Indian IT professionals are in huge demand

A young Indian IT professional in India is earning more than double the average salary than any other profession. They are also likely to see their salaries jump more than any other professional in the country right now - with salaries rising about 20% a year on average. In last few years, people have left their jobs in other engineering streams and joined the Software bandwagon. Even then, India faces a huge scarcity of software guys as per the recent Nasscom Survey. Infact, by 2010, the demand and supply gap is going to be as wide as half a million jobs. For the IT and IT-enabled sectors alone, the manpower requirement would be around three million workers a year.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that shows India on the verge of a talent crisis. In a bizarre twist, consulting firm Gartner issued a recommendation to India CIOs on June 11 that they start looking offshore, to Hong Kong and Singapore, for IT workers rather than fight for talent within their own country. The growing economy in India has created big IT budgets, yet India CIOs often can't beat the big service companies like Tata and IBM at the recruiting game. Core application development is the most difficult type of talent to find in India right now. The majority of trained IT professionals in India are generalists in IT services and support.

Regions like Mexico, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and China are rising to meet demand for high-level, low-cost IT work, but it won't happen quickly or easily. None have yet been able to offer that magic troika of good English/good training/good political environment found in India. There's no question workforce globalization will continue, but it's a moving target. India may not be the bull's-eye much longer.

India could be faced with a shortage of a quarter-million information technology workers in five years unless there is reform in technical education, warned an IT industry association in the country. "Though India has a large talent pool, with 167,000 engineering students and 1.54 million graduates passing out of India's educational institutions annually, some training gaps remain." There is a growing need for talent in niche areas of the information technology industry. Leading players realise that the best way to source the skilled manpower required to fuel their ambitious growth plans is to develop it themselves by working with leading education institutes.

Other findings from Nasscom's survey include:

• Hiring of new IT professionals was highest in South India at 44 percent and lowest in the Eastern region at 6 percent.

• The overall median age of Indian software professionals was 26.5 years.

• 79 percent of professionals in software companies were men, whereas 21 percent were women. The ratio is reversed in the IT-enabled services sector, where the ratio of males to females is 35-to-65.

• 42 percent of the software professionals or knowledge workers surveyed possessed more than three years of work experience.

• The survey also revealed that 76 percent of all software professionals had a graduate degree or higher.