Jobs glut challenges India

MYSORE, India — At the heart of the sprawling corporate campus, in a hilltop building overlooking the immaculately shorn lawns, the sports fields and the hypermodern theater complex, young engineers crowd into a classroom.

They are India's best and brightest, with stellar grades that launched them into a high-tech industry growing at more than 25 percent annually.

And their topic of the day? Basic telephone skills.

"Hello?" one young man says nervously, holding his hand to his ear like a phone. "Hello? I'd like to leave a message for Number 17. Can I do that?"

Nearly two decades into India's phenomenal growth as an international center for high technology, the industry has a problem: It's running out of workers.

There may be a lot of potential — Indian schools churn out 400,000 new engineers, the core of the high-tech industry, every year — but as few as 100,000 are actually ready to join the job world, experts say.

Instead, graduates are leaving universities that are mired in theory classes, and sometimes so poorly funded they don't have computer labs. Even students from the best colleges can be dulled by cram schools and left without the most basic communication skills, according to industry leaders.

So the country's voracious high-tech companies, desperate for ever-increasing numbers of staffers to fill their ranks, have to go hunting.

"The problem is not a shortage of people," said Mohandas Pai, human resources chief for Infosys Technologies, the software giant that built and runs the Mysore campus for its new employees. "It's a shortage of trained people."

From the outside, this nation of 1.03 billion, with its immense English-speaking population, may appear to have a bottomless supply of cheap workers with enough education to claim more outsourced Western jobs.

But things look far different in India, where technology companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a frantic attempt to ensure their profitmaking machine keeps producing.

"This is really the Achilles heel of the industry," said James Friedman, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group, an investment firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., who has studied the issue.

"When we first started covering the industry, in 2000, there were maybe 50,000 jobs and 500,000 applicants," he said. Now there are perhaps 180,000 annual openings, but only between 100,000 and 200,000 qualified candidates.