I was recently reading an article on rediff.com which discusses the prospects of the BPO industry in India in the coming days. According to the article, the Indian outsourcing industry has entered “a new era of growth” owing to several companies desperately wanting to cut costs and looking to outsource like never before. The article goes on to say that attrition rates have already gone down and are plummeting further.
Though the BPO job market looks promising, we have to wonder whether we have enough quality talent to meet the requirements. Companies ideally want committed candidates possessing all the basic qualifications and skills necessary for the job profile. Unfortunately, finding such talent takes a lot of effort. Infosys, a premier IT firm, hires only 1% of the over 1.5 million applications it receives annually.
Around 2.5 million graduates walk out of the many colleges in India every year- out of which around 400,000 are engineers and 200,000 IT professionals. However, according to NASSCOM, only about half of these graduates are employable. Why does this happen? There are many reasons, one of the most important being that the existing education system is not industry oriented and therefore does not prepare them.
Tags: attrition, BPO, candidates, colleges, companies, employable, engineers, graduates, growth, industry, IT professionals, job, NASSCOM, outsourcing, profile, prospects, qualifications, quality, rates, requirements, Skills, talent
Category: Education System
Comments
Jyotsna 10/03/09
Continuing my previous comment, and going by what you are saying, what we are looking at is a need to change our syllabus orientation and focus on skills that help you deal with life. We need specialization right from school level. Why should calculus be compulsory in school when the average math people use in later life is only that learnt till, say 8th grade? And why must students memorize speeches from Shakespeare’s plays when they cannot string a sentence together without help? What purpose does the extra information serve? It merely creates unnecessary pressure for the child, which is again added to with board exams.
A more flexible system that allows for levels in the subjects to be learnt (regular, honors, advanced) may help the students discover at an early level where their skills and interests lie and aid them in deciding the ideal career choice.
This, hopefully, will also remove the unhealthy competitiveness that has become a bane of the Indian education system.
Soumalaya 10/03/09
I agree. The education system in India is somewhat of a mess right now and with so many boards and systems, there is no fixed policy in place. We definitely need more flexibility in our courses. I believe there can be a standard curriculum covering the basics of all subjects till the 10th standard and beyond that in addition to division of streams, students should be made aware of the various job opportunities in different streams and given some basic training on the job-roles that interest them. Regular career counselling and exposure to the industry will help achieve this purpose.