India's OPD faces skills shortage
India’s booming Outsourced Product Development (OPD) industry may soon face a shortage of skilled product engineers. The country’s burgeoning industry has been pegged by a Nasscom-McKinsey report to reach $11 billion come 2008. On the worldwide scale, the OPD industry fetches $9 billion, with a year-on-year rate of 20%.
The current roster of product engineers number around 80,000 – significantly below the projected 280,000 by 2008. If this deficiency is not addressed in good time, the Indian OPD industry might have to tap US product engineers. The CEO of Chennai-based Aspire Systems, Gowri Shankar Subramanian has cited plans to import engineers from, of all places, the US which serves as convergence point of product companies and product-oriented engineers.
While the lack of IT workers is nothing new to India’s outsourcing industry, the OPD industry is feeling the full brunt of this shortage. Subramanian points out, “It is not a question of availability of engineering graduates. India churns out thousands of engineering graduates every year. The concern here is about the gross shortage in the availability of product oriented engineers.”
In order to stem the growing shortage, in-house trainings have been provided for product engineers. Product development companies now train their employees for 3 – 6 months for product development to a perfectionist’s level. Mr. Subramanian proudly points out, “We try to instill a sense of perfectionism in our employees during the training period.”
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