Friday, October 9, 2009

Technology education and skills shortage in India.

According to a recent article in the Financial Times,
India is facing a shortage of civil engineers. If India
has to sustain a growth rate of 9% then the number
of civil engineers needs to rise threefold. India
currently produces around 10000-12000 civil engineers
per annum.

I have a number of observations in this regard.
i) Most of the good civil engineering students are
recruited by the IT companies from the colleges.
These companies are mostly Tier 1 service companies
with good training infrastructure. These candidates
are given training for 3-6 months and are redeployed
for software services work.
ii) The IT companies are forced to recruit candidates
from other domains due to the shortage of engineers
with IT specialization in engineering.
So, the shortage of civil engineers is further aggravated
due to their poaching by the IT companies. Secondly,
the crème de la crème of the civil engineers move out
of the domain into IT. This overall affects the quality of
civil engineering work in the country.

I think the problem can be solved by the massive
increase of technology education in the country.
Secondly, there should be proportionately more
IT seats in engineering colleges to meet the needs
of the IT industry. This will ensure skill set and
requirement match. It will also save the training
costs of the IT companies.

But, finally in the long run market will take care of the
shortage of civil engineers. The shortage will drive
up the salaries of the civil engineers.This in turn will
incentivize students to join the stream. This will also
stop the migration of civil engineers to the IT sector.