Contrary to popular perception, career opportunities of those trained in Y2K, ERP, Windows NT have not reached a dead end. So far, companies with limited budgets were only fighting a high-pitched battle to ensure Y2K compliance to the exclusion of other lucrative projects, especially euro conversion.

According to K Kesavswamy of the training division of Tata Consultancy Services at Technopark here, there are over 3,46,000 core-skill IT jobs in the US which are currently vacant. Participating in a seminar on career guidance for IT organised by Tandem Infotech Ltd, he said that the latest IT Association of America figures reveal that 50 per cent of US firms admitted to having problems in getting qualified IT personneland that there was a moderate to severe gap between requirement and availability. On the other hand, a survey among 4,500 respondents in the US found that 60 per cent lacked basic mathematics skills although engineering skills are not often required for IT development jobs.

The trend is now towards hiring people from other professions to help in software programming. The TCS centre in Thiruvananthapuram has recently hired two MBBS-qualified doctors for project work in healthcare software. Similarly, tremendous opportunities are there for those with business knowledge and specialists in banking, insurance, transport, healthcare and remote sensing, Kesavaswamy said.

According to a survey in the US, professionals hardest to recruit are programmers, test engineers, database analysts, QA specialists, metric/process specialist in decreasing order of difficulty.

On the other hand, in countries outside the US (which is also applicable to India), firms face difficulty in recruiting networkinganalysts/architects, business analyst, project leaders, test engineers and metrics/process specialists in decreasing order of difficulty. This goes on to prove that our programmers, test engineers and metric process specialists have tremendous opportunities in the US because of their superior maths skills and programming ability.

A casual analysis of opportunities in Indian IT sector reveals the fact that internet, intranets, relational database management systems (Oracle, base etc), Unix, C++, VC++ offers more opportunities than CAD/CAM, Windows NT, IBM Mainframe AS400, ERP and general user interface (GUI) related jobs.For IT professionals, therefore it is better to concentrate more on internet, intranet, RDBMS, UNIX, C++ etc. metrics, process specialisation, software testing, quality assurance and project management.

For other engineers joining the IT stream, it is better to obtain mastery over Unix and C++, RDBMS,ERP, and complete atleast one non-academic project in a private or government concern evenif it is free of cost as a minimum of two years experience is a must for the IT industry.

The integration of computer technology and satellite communications has thrown up tremendous opportunities for both technical and non-technical people in implementation, testing, maintenance and content creation over internet, and across all kinds of corporate networks, Ramesh Kumar, director of Software Technology Parks-Thiruvananthapuram said.

The expansion of job market would be dependent on the expansion of the domestic IT industry in the country. The era of Y2K, ERP may be over but the scope for IT-enabled services, e-commerce and internet have only started looking up. According to latest figures, there are over 700 ERP professionals jobless in the country which was not the case a year ago.