The Indian software industry is expected to hire more and more non-engineering graduates to combat talent shortage, attrition and wage inflation. The practice that has been on for a while as a fallback measure is now expected to soon become a norm across the industry.
IT industry executives say that ?right-skilling?, or jobs matching the capabilities of applicants?rather than focusing only on whether they have engineering degrees?will become the order of the day. Industry biggies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Satyam say they will step up initia-tives to recruit and train non-engineering or BSc graduates to do less complex jobs like testing, infrastructure management, production support and so on. This allows engineers to do more complex jobs that require specialisation.
Wipro says it will hire 3,500 non-engineers in 2009, while TCS says 1,500 BSc graduates are being trained already under its programme, Ignite. Similarly, Infosys has hired 3,000 undergraduates over the past there years, and Satyam has planned that, in the coming years, 20% of its entry-level hiring will consist of BSc graduates.
Science graduates are attractive to IT players for many reasons. For one, this new crop of workers offers an alternate talent pool for the sector. Software and services industry lobby group Nasscom has projected a big manpower shortfall?close to half a million?by 2010.
Says Infosys HR director TV Mohandas Pai, ?In the next two years, the pool of engineering colleges in India would have reached an optimum level, and the quality of engineering graduates will start getting poorer.
The industry needs to create an alternate pool. Ideally, 25% of the technical work done in the IT industry can be done by non-engineers.? Currently, about 4% of Infosys? technical staff is from non-engineering background.
Companies like TCS and Wipro took a cue from the western market, where software jobs were not necessarily linked to engineering degrees. The world over, especially in the US, people from diverse backgrounds enter IT and do well. ?Indian companies had a fixation that only engineers could do such jobs. We learned that the issue was only that of training them,? says Wipro vice-president, HR, Pratik Kumar. The company pioneered the practice to hire science graduates for tech jobs in 1995, and has found that non-engineers strive harder to prove themselves to be as efficient as those with engineering degrees.
Infosys? Pai strongly advocates ?right-skilling? as the future model for the entire Indian industry, not just software. According to him, companies across sectors would have to increasingly adopt the right-skilling model to optimise resource utilisation to remain competitive. ?The maturing of the BPO sector has, in one, way helped the IT industry in sourcing good talent,? says Pai. ?Graduates trained in areas like transaction processes in the BPO sector are good for the IT industry. It is time that the industry created alternate career paths for those with no software engineering background.?
The Indian IT industry has been lamenting the poor quality of graduates, saying that only 25% are employable. In the past few years, IT companies that play by high volumes have boosted academia relations to improve the quality of fresh graduates. But Pai cautions that the pool of science graduates among the 3.5 million graduates being produced by Indian universities could also dwindle over time. ?There are only eight lakh BSc graduates, while 50 % to 60% of the graduates have begun to opt for non-science streams like BSc or BCom. This is because the job prospects for science graduates have been declining,? he points out.
There is good news, however. The adopters of the right-skilling model say that they would expand the practice as it has produced excellent results for organisations.
Interestingly, companies have found that the new pool of employees complement existing teams by adding unique skill sets and texture to the work force. For instance, Satyam?s talent acquisition head Mukund Menon says, ?We would like to continue this practice that enables us to bring in diversity of skills, strengths and competencies and helps optimise talent.?
TCS? ?science-to?software? training programme Ignite began in December 2006, with 500 trainees in the pilot batch. Now, it trains 1,500 non-engineers to code.
?As software becomes more complex and the customer more ambitious, hiring non-engineers equips us with a diverse range of skill sets when we bid for complex, global projects,? says Ignite head Raman Srinivasan.
Broadly, 25% of tech-jobs do not require an engineering degree, while non-engineers currently do only less than 10% of them. Wipro plans to expand its pool of non-engineers in the technical work force to 25% in the next three years, compared with 12% at present.
?In the next three years, we would like to see the mix (of non-engineers to engineers) at 25: 75,? says Kumar. But the new hiring policy comes with a small rider. While it brings down attrition and wage costs, the fresh hands, with relatively low exposure to computing, need more training than engineers before being placed on projects.
Mafoi COO E Balaji cautions that companies would need to spend extended training hours on the fresh recruits. ?They would require more dedicated training and in that sense, call for more investments than engineers,? says Balaji.
Infosys trains BSc graduates for close to six months, compared with three months? training modules that it offers for qualified engineers. Wipro has a dedicated training initiative called Wipro Academy of Software Excellence (WASE), which is 8-10 weeks long. It trains BSc, BCA and BCM graduates for software jobs. The company has also tied up with BITS-Pilani to offer four-year masters degrees for those in the WASE programme.
TCS? Ignite focuses on creating strong fundamentals in software programming skills among trainees, but it also teaches soft skills, customer orientation and project management skills.
The company?s Ignite facility in Chennai is equipped to train three batches of 500 students at a time. Businesses have found different ways to spot potential talent among undergraduates.
TCS, for instance, has customised tests for measuring aptitude, mathematical skills, reasoning skills and for assessing personality of the applicants. To gain admission to Wipro?s WASE programme, applicants have to clear an aptitude test similar to the GRE/GMAT tests.
Although there has been encouraging feedback to this trend?and more and more IT companies are expected to take it up?it may be too early yet to bet on right-skilling as a long-term solution to the problem of manpower (and faculty) shortage that the country?s booming IT sector is facing.