Couple of days back i put up a post titled "Talent Management by Wipro", In continuation, here is an excerpt of what Azim Premji had to say on the possible Talen shortage problem in India, this was from the transcript of the Investor Presentation made:

I keep getting questions on whether we are in a situation that they are going to come into a labor shortage in India, whether we are in a situation which is going to come into a escalating cost of people in India, which will make it unaffordable to do business going forward? I would like to make couple of emphatic points, one is India will graduate this year about 425,000 engineers both diploma engineers and degree engineers. Diploma engineers being 3-year engineers after 12 years of school and degree engineers being 4-years engineers, this compares with about 75,000 engineers which United States will graduate this year, compares with about between 30,000 and 35,000 engineers Germany, which is probably the most engineering nation in the world, will graduate this year. So in terms of sheer quantity, India has scale, and this production of engineers or this graduation of engineers given intake on campus which has been happening over the past three years will be increased in terms of graduating engineers by somewhere between 12 and 15% a year going forward, which is substantial. Engineering continues to be the second most preferred profession in India, next to medicine, and medicine has a very narrow base. So even though most of our universities may not meet international standards, the quality of our people - graduate from these universities meet international standards, and therefore they are trainable. All it requires is very active participation by our association but more importantly by companies such as Wipro, companies such as Infosys, TCS, Satyam, Cognizant, etc., to participate actively in teaching the professors and participate actively at least in the last year in enhancing the learning and competence skills for the students.

We are very actively involved in that as a company just to enhance our base of selection from the 150 universities we do target. The other important development on this is that there is a significant movement towards right skilling, people which you are hiring for software professional jobs and for BPO jobs, and by means of right skilling what I mean is we do not over-select people, in terms of taking engineers when we don't require engineers. There is a also a very major move of setting up collaborative programs between universities and the graduate, science graduates, which are coming from university. We as a company run a very important program which we call Wipro Academy of software engineering which we have been running for 9 years. In the next 12 months we will recruit 3500 people into it who are BSc's (Bachelor of Sciences) in Math, Physics, Statistics, Biology, Chemistry and put them through as trainees into a 4-year program with BITS, Pilani, which is exactly in the category of the IIT. End of 4 years they will graduate as Masters degree in software engineering. These young boys and girls for the interim period work with us full time and are productive on the job as equivalent of software engineers within 6 months of joining us, they are so motivated, they are so full of energy, and they are so determined to prove themselves equal or better than the engineers.

We do a similar program for B.Sc. without going through this program but other modified forms of program.So we are changing our skill mix also but without comprising in quality and without compromising career movement we are adding to our engineering talent by a non engineering talent which can either shape into engineering talent or can do jobs in testing and infrastructure support which do not necessarily require engineering talent, and I emphasize this point is because if anyone single thing will contain the rate of inflation of the talent pool coming into the market it is going to be diversification of the sourcing and supply chain of people who will be doing jobs in software and the BPO industry. BPO industry is a much higher significance of a labor pool from which you can recruit from.

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai