Software Jobs in India : What's Drawing India's Youth to Software Jobs

What's Drawing India's Youth to Software Jobs
Bloomberg - USA

Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) -- By hiring Prity Tewary, Wipro Ltd., India's third-biggest software exporter, may have found the key to expanding the engineering talent pool Indian universities produce in a year.

For the last two years, the 24-year-old Tewary, who has a bachelor's degree in computer applications, has worked as a project engineer, writing code for the overseas clients of Wipro.

She and 1,100 others, many of them plain vanilla science graduates, are studying for a four-year master of science degree in software, telecommunications and microelectronics on Saturdays.

Wipro is paying their tuition fees, providing them with classroom resources on its sprawling, university-type campuses, and giving them stipends that start at 6,000 rupees ($137) a month. In turn, the student-workers are helping the company go beyond the limited universe of 184,000 fresh engineers available each year for hiring as programmers.

``We build our own engineers,'' says S.K. Bhagavan, who oversees Wipro's in-house ``talent transformation'' team of 70 faculty members. In a year, Bhagavan's team conducts 150,000 hours of training, and that includes coaching in ``soft skills'' needed by a workforce that interacts with clients globally.

Youth Magnet

The non-technical lessons, available on the company's Intranet and a must-read for any employee visiting a client outside of India, range from introduction to English breakfast (``Many British people eat toast with butter or margarine and jam.'') to why it's impolite to ask an American how much money he makes (``In India, elders would think nothing of asking younger people for that information,'' Bhagavan explains.).

Software companies have become a magnet for India's youth, as much for the promise of a good life as for the opportunity to learn skills that are useful in the global marketplace but aren't covered in standard university curriculum.

The Wipro Academy of Software Excellence turned out its first batch of 36 students in 2001. Now, the annual intake has increased to 500.

Seven out of 10 employees hired in the last three years by Infosys Technologies Ltd., Wipro's slightly bigger competitor by market value, were fresh graduates. In order to raise the quality of the talent it hires, the Bangalore-based company has now released some of the courseware it uses to train its employees to universities under a $2 million ``Campus Connect'' initiative.

Talent Search

For Wipro, which has about 40,000 people and is building a new campus in Bangalore to accommodate another 12,500, its investment in education is based on sound economics.

The upper end of the labor market is getting uncomfortably tight for Indian software companies.

Wipro paid an average $5,000 a year for engineers it recruited from engineering schools last year, a figure that may appear unappetizing to the 3,700 students graduating from the top- notch Indian Institutes of Technology, or the IITs.

The top students in an IIT graduating class are increasingly being pursued by employers such as McKinsey & Co., Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., often with offers exceeding $100,000 a year.

``This year, when we go to the IITs to hire, we think it'll be a challenge,'' says Bijay Sahoo, chief of human resources at Wipro. ``The same compensation which we paid for the last three years may not work going forward in IIT campuses. Other engineering colleges are still okay.''

Capping Costs

With wage costs account for half of revenue, investors and analysts are increasingly scrutinizing the ability of Indian software services companies to boost their profit margin by negotiating higher prices with clients or by sending more of the work they do onsite for their U.S. and European clients to India where programmers take a sixth of U.S. wages.

It looks like there's another way to control costs.

The trick, as Wipro has discovered, is to find eager youngsters like Tewary who aren't engineers, but who are hungry for employable education and who can be put on live projects together with more experienced engineers with only three months of initial training.

At an aggregate level too, India needs to convert more of its generalist scientific talent into software professionals to sustain the industry's competitiveness. Out of a total population of 7.7 million science and technology professionals in 2000, about half, or 3.8 million, were science graduates. Only 970,000 were graduate engineers, according to an estimate by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research in New Delhi.

While India does need more science doctorates to carry out research, it doesn't need more unemployed physics graduates.

Tewary says prospects of money and glamour drew her to Bangalore. ``It's a great opportunity,'' she says, taking a moment from a post-lunch chat with colleagues, most of them as young as herself, on the steps of the amphitheater where Wipro's two in-house rock bands perform some evenings, making the place look even more like a university campus. ``At the end of four years, I'll get my degree and a job offer from Wipro.''