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The Future of Outsourcing in India

Posted by Zonk on from the i-would-personally-rather-keep-the-jobs-here dept.

aaditeshwar writes "Economist has an article on the current and projected state of outsourcing IT and other business processes to India. The biggest problem seems to be that the talent pool of skilled workers will not able to keep up. Currently there are about 700,000 people working in IT and outsourcing, which is likely to grow up to 2.3 million by 2010, but only 1.05 million new graduates will qualify from local colleges in the next 5 years leading to a shortfall of 500,000 workers! All this despite the fact that almost 2.5 million students graduate in India each year." From the article: "In IT the growth in Indian exports is expected to come both from the software market, and from 'traditional IT outsourcing'--such as the remote management of whole systems, a market now dominated by the big global IT consultancies. This is expected to rise from 8% of Indian sales now to about 30% in 2010, while software-development's share will fall from 55% to 39%. In business-process-offshoring, the big industries will remain banking and insurance. But rapid expansion is also expected in other areas, like legal services."

2 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Meanwhile, Bill Gates by Travoltus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    [To add insult to injury, Americans companies are not willing to train people on the job. There is no job training, nor employee loyalty in the US tech sector.]
    Oh, that is very true. I've interviewed many people to work for me and my boss has ordered me to turn them down in favor of waiting for more experienced people to come along. When that doesn't happen, THEN we hire the best inexperienced one in the bunch.

    But now, as far as I've seen, this is true of all sectors.

    Any job, even retailers like Target, demand years of experience first. Even if you have a degree, they want experience, too. Having a degree only means you are more competitive with other experienced workers.

    No job except the lowest end of food service will ever hire someone without experience now.

    --
    --- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
  2. U folks have talked about so much(little) stuff.. by FeralTitan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    and here are my thoughts
    • 1.Education in India is not 2 year boot camps it is usually 4 years for an education in IT. Also, the reason most of these folks are better than there US counterparts is because the Indian Education System is very difficult.Also, some of the worlds best technical institutes are in India. Ever heard of 'Asok' in Dilbert strips, he was from Indian Inst. of Tech. and he could blow up your head by just concentrating ;)
    • 2.There are really 2 kinds of outsourcing, IT and ITES (or BPO) IT outsourcing is about programming and is called so because it was the first wave well before BPO. When the BPO wave came they decided to call it BPO so that one could differentiate between the two, so folks like you and me could talk about it intelligently.
    • 3.If you cant find people in India, its your head-hunter who is usually to blame. Also, this whole exercise is more complicated than you might at first imagine. For example most Indians don't like to relocate to a different city - they prefer staying with thier families and usually their parents are old and need care.Also, like someone mentioned it is very easy to retrain programmers on other languages etc.
    • 4.This whole discussion is dominated by 'IT' the 2.5 million folks who graduate arent all IT and a lot more than IT is getting outsourced to India now.Trust me it will suprise you what new work is getting outsourced, everything from lawyers to doctors to mathematicians and tutors and ...
    • 5.One of the basic reasons that a US programmer is expensive is because the education is expensive. Why do you want to make knowledge so expensive and inaccesible? Shouldnt education be cheap - bad US govt. policies? Arent you te folks who invented all this free knowledge thingy? Open source and Wikipedia and what not? Well, some advice make it cheap to get trained in the US and do it fast.
    • 6.Employees are not slave drivers in India - most companies have decent office culture and practices.Very uninformed opinnion!
    • 7.I believe that once Asia and Africa are done with, the work will go back to the US - it will be the developing country then. In the next century Asia will completely outrun the US in every walk of life.
    • 8.Someone mentioned that every outsourcing story they heard was a disaster - obviously they havent a clue! :)

    Anyway what do you folks say? ------- Apologies for typos and bad formatting - NO TIME.