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India will require two-fold increase in workforce: CII
Sunday, 19 November 2006, 20:30 IST
Bangalore: Despite being a country of over a billion strong, the Indian manufacturing and services industries is expected to face a manpower shortage, especially in finding the right person for the right job, in the next few years.
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) estimates a booming economy - with about eight percent GDP growth annually - will require about 16-20 million workforce in the organised sector over the next 10 years to sustain the current high growth rate.
A study, presented at the 14th CII quality summit here, has revealed that of the existing 8.5-million workforce in the organised sector, about 30 percent will retire in the next five years.
"Inequity in the demand-supply of manpower will persist in diverse industry verticals such as IT, retail, banking, manufacturing, logistics, infrastructure and management due to lack of quality workforce, absence of vocational training and job-hopping," said Anand Sudarshan, Manipal Universal Learning Ltd president.
Participating in the plenary session Saturday on 'Building a learning organisation and bridging the talent gap', Sudarshan said in the knowledge economy, the IT/BPO sector alone would require a workforce of about 2.3 million by 2010 as against 1.2 million people presently.
"With an annual growth rate of 30 percent, the IT/BPO sector will be hiring about 360,000 people in this fiscal (2006-07) and, in turn, create a million indirect jobs across the board to support its operations and infrastructure," Sudarshan said.
The mismatch between demand and supply of manpower in the industry is due to the shortage of employable graduates. Though talent inflow is large at school level, the output trickles down at higher education levels.
As a result, employable graduates have become a scarce commodity and competition for the same talent pool is leading to poaching, attrition and higher wage costs in the industry.
"As the Indian GDP is estimated to double to $1.6 trillion by 2016 from $8 billion currently, capacity building to create talented workforce and meet the targets is a challenge faced by all stakeholders, especially the industry, academia, government and civil society," Sudarshan said.
Though a whopping 195 million students enrol at school level nationwide, only 11 million of them go to college for higher education, about 200,000 to university for master's degree and just 16,500 for research, the study found.
"Ironically, while the 1,540 engineering colleges across the country offer 525,000 seats, about 460,000 students enrol and 360,000 of them graduate every year. Only 200,000 of them have reasonable quality but require intense training to qualify for an IT job.
One of the reasons for poor quality of engineering graduates is an acute shortage of faculty. With 15 percent attrition rate, there are about 40,000 faculty vacancies in professional colleges," Sudarshan pointed out.
"Talent creation and management have become the most critical business process for India Inc. Corporations are spending a 'disproportionate' amount of time and resources in raising human capital. More than anything, it is the intangible asset of talent that adds greater value to a company's balance sheet," Grow Talent Co founder and CEO Anil Sachdev said.
Citing the example of Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation in talent management, Sachdev said the cooperative society was able to beat the multinationals at their own game by motivating its stakeholders, including the humble milk producers to perform and deliver at their best.
Source: IANS
Source: IANS