[Kictanet] Re: India's Weaknesses

[Edith Adera]

Certainly, a great lesson to learn from.

Thanks for sharing the article!

At / À 12:56 PM 10/24/2006, bitange at jambo.co.ke wrote / a écrit:
>Dear All,
>I think there are good lessons to learn from the article below.
>
>Regards
>
>Ndemo.
>
>
>October 17, 2006
>Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom in India
>By SOMINI SENGUPTA
><http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/somini_sengupta/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
>
>TIRUCHENGODE, India
><http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/india/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>
>— As its technology companies soar to the outsourcing skies, India is
>bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as
>a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers,
>a shortage looms.
>
>India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last
>count. But their competence has become the issue.
>
>A study commissioned by a trade group, the National Association of
>Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom, found only one in four
>engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the
>required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team
>or deliver basic oral presentations.
>
>The skills gap reflects the narrow availability of high-quality college
>education in India and the galloping pace of the country's service-driven
>economy, which is growing faster than nearly all but China's. The software
>and service companies provide technology services to foreign companies,
>many of them based in the United States. Software exports alone expanded
>by 33 percent in the last year.
>
>The university systems of few countries would be able to keep up with such
>demand, and India is certainly having trouble. The best and most selective
>universities generate too few graduates, and new private colleges are
>producing graduates of uneven quality.
>
>Many fear that the labor pinch may signal bottlenecks in other parts of
>the economy. It is already being felt in the information technology
>sector.
>
>With the number of technology jobs expected to nearly double to 1.7
>million in the next four years, companies are scrambling to find fresh
>engineering talent and to upgrade the schools that produce it.
>
>Some companies are training faculty members themselves, offering courses
>tailored to industry needs and improving college labs and libraries. They
>are rushing to get first choice of would-be engineers long before they
>have completed their course work. And they are fanning out to small,
>remote colleges that almost no one had heard of before. The country's most
>successful technology concerns can no longer afford to hire only
>
>
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