Manpower availability is not adequate

Ask any solution provider or any of the decent sized channel partner about

the biggest issue facing him, an overwhelming majority will point out the lack

of manpower. Lack of manpower in the second most populous country of the world?

A country where almost eight crore people are unemployed!

It's a strange paradox but absolutely true. There is no dearth of manpower.

However, what is lacking is the right kind of manpower, which would be of use to

the solution providers. In other words, there are just not enough technically

qualified people available in the market today, notwithstanding the fact that

India has one of the largest base of highly-skilled, English speaking manpower.

The fact of the matter is they are there and yet they are not there.

As it is, today the inflow of new qualified manpower in the industry is very

low. On top of that, what is happening is that companies are poaching people

from one another. Company A recruits a person who after some time joins company

B and then to company C and maybe back to company A later. As a result of this

coming and going, the salary levels are going through the roof which in turn, is

taking the financial health of the solution providers to the cleaners.

Solution providers in most cases spend a lot of money to train their

technical manpower and also get them certified by Cisco, Microsoft, Novell etc.

But when it comes to retention, all efforts come to naught. And the culprits

responsible for this sorry state happen to be the vendors themselves who snare

up these trained people.

So, is there anything, which can be done to address this critical situation?

The biggest thing which can be done is that the industry needs to get closely

involved with the academicia in the technical institutes to ensure that what is

being taught is absolutely current and relevant to the needs of the industry.

Only then the quality of offtake will be good resulting in adequate availability

of qualified people.

The other important factor is manpower retention and retraining. In this fast

changing cyber world, it has become imperative for companies to constantly

retrain their people so that they don't get obsolete. In addition, companies

have to devise newer and more innovative HRD policies to retain their



people. This is one area, which is still largely neglected by the solution
providers. It would help them a lot if they gave this issue a serious thought.

Asim Raina