Wanted: Manpower

 A crippling shortage of software professionals is looming large over the country's booming software industry. Estimates by the industry, which presently employs about 1,30,000 people, put the current availability of human resources at 25 per cent of requirement. And projects a shortfall of 2,00,000 developers by the end of the century.

"With so many new companies coming in, the demand for software developers has risen dramatically," says Ian Hasan, associate vice-president, HRD, Technologies Ltd. Says Dr A.L. Rao, group vice-president, WIPRO Infotech: "Business has become limited not because of lack of opportunities, but due to the shortage of human resources. If, for instance, I had 100 IBM-platform designers today, I could just go and pick up projects off the shelf."

But more than numbers, the crunch lies in the quality. With the expansion of the Internet, the advent of visual or event-driven programming, and complex new needs in the telecom sector, a host of new knowledge needs have hit software developers. For entry-level jobs, the course content of engineering colleges around India are suddenly rendered inadequate. "Less than 15 per cent of fresh engineers is capable of handling a job," says S. Gopalan, CEO, Integral Techsoft. Rao compares the situation to teaching a person the alphabet and asking him immediately to write an essay. Which is not surprising, says Dr Sugata Mitra, senior vice-president, R&D, NIIT. "In infotech, there are changes in the subject once in two weeks while institutions revise curricula once in two years and the government does so once in 10 years. So, by definition, the student is out of sync," he points out.

As a consequence, at the middle levels, opportunities boomed, leading to massive job-switching, and an average attrition rate of 20 per cent for the industry. So there is a big shortage at the mid-levels, that is, of professionals with specific expertise and advanced skills, with two to six years' experience. But, points out Rao, professionals are moving from one skill level to another without gaining adequate experience at any one level, unlike in the past when designers worked with programming languages like Cobol or Fortran for decades. The average experience of a C++ programmer today, he says, is less than six months. Result: a dearth of specialists to design quality programs.

Naturally, companies are not waiting for the schools to catch up. In-house training is the new buzzphrase. The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) plans to set up an institute of software professionals on the lines of the Indian Chartered Accountants' Institute, where students can be ensured industrial training in software companies. The agency is also negotiating a programme where it can use IIT professors to impart distance education through high-speed video and audio links.

Some companies have also devised some unique solutions. At Infosys, employees are offered up to Rs 10,000 if they refer a professional working elsewhere for a position in Infosys and the candidate is recruited. The WIPRO Academy of Software Excellence (WASE), set up last year, runs a three-year course to prepare graduates, who are paid a stipend, for WIPRO projects. WASE restricts training to one specific skill area—IBM projects for the first batch—during the three-year period to provide experience and prevent migration from one level to another.

But all this may not be enough. For, stressing on technology could be only part of the solution. Says Ajay R. Mehta, managing director, PSI Data Systems: "Winners in this business will be the ones who modify this 'only technology' focus to move on to 'customer focus'. The software professionals of tomorrow must not only be technically competent, but also develop excellent people communication skills, people and project management expertise, and most importantly, learn to be customer-driven." That's no small order.