Thursday, October 12, 2006

The Talent Wars

Talent is the focus of last weeks edition of the Economist and it’s a great read. Pick it up if you have any interest at all in HR, outsourcing, or if you are wondering if you will have a job next year.

Some facts from the articles…

Infosys Technologies was started in 1981 by seven Indian entrepreneurs with a total of $1,000 between them. Infosys now has annual revenues of $2.2 billion and 58,000 employees. But Infosys is just one of hundreds of companies in Bangalore.

Every year, India produces close to 2.5 million university graduates, including 400,000 engineers and 300,000 IT professionals. India may have 28% of the worlds IT offshore talent.

The cost of an Indian graduate? 12% of that of an American one.

And an Indian graduate works an average of 2,350 hours a year compared to 1,900 in America.

But India is facing severe skilled labor shortages themselves…they expect to have a shortfall of 500,000 professionals by the year 2010. That’s 4 years from now.

And how are our schools doing in trying to keep up with this worldwide explosion of learning? With the money now allocated, we can barely keep the schools painted and heated, never mind trying to maintain a state of the art computer lab. T’ain’t happening! Besides, since the roof probably leaks, it’s better that there are no computers in the rooms.

And why is that? Simple, just ask any conservative. They hate taxes! I’m never quite sure how they expect schools to educate if they have no money. But to the conservative mind, it doesn’t matter. No new taxes!

Ouch! I don't know about you, but that kind of warped thinking gives me a headache...

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