Thanks to PS Ndemo for bringing this out. As for Wafula's question, the work force survey undertaken by the CSK earlier this year revealed that there is very little linkage between what the ICT training institutions (including Universities) are producing and the requirements of the industry either now or in the foreseeable future. Certainly there appear to be no mechanisms to facilitate such linkage. Perhaps something could be done now before we find ourselves in India's position. Kind Regards Waudo Siganga On Wed, October 25, 2006 9:22 am, TONY WAFULA wrote:
Good lesson , though wonder whether as a country we are ready to address manpower shortage in this area. Just the other day Safaricom's Micheal Joseph was lamenting about the same...are we checking what our Universities are offering in relation to our projected needs?
Regards
Wafula
bitange@jambo.co.ke wrote: Hi Edith, You must have been blogging.
Regards
Ndemo.
Certainly, a great lesson to learn from.
Thanks for sharing the article!
At / À 12:56 PM 10/24/2006, bitange@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
TIRUCHENGODE, India
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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