The Working Week 52

Despite all the economic gloom out there, the fact remains that many economies in the developed world face increasing shortages of skilled workers as their demographic chickens come home to roost.

But what does the situation look like from an Indian perspective? That's the theme for this week's Working Week Podcast, in which Wayne if joined from India by Gautam Ghosh.

Gautam is based in Hyderabad, where he is a Senior Consultant at Tvarita Consulting as well as a prolific blogger.

As far as the talent crisis goes, Gautam explains that the problem in India is not that there is any shortage of applicants – precisely the opposite – but that the "employability factor" of graduates and young people is very low.

In particular, he says, organisations find huge problems with levels of communication skills. For example, highly-qualified software engineers may be great at writing code, but their lack of client-facing skills means that they face big problems at middle-manager and project-manager levels.

One reason for this is that Indian employers still place far too much emphasis on paper qualification and not enough on aptitude, ending up paying the price as a result through the need for extensive on-the-job training to boost certain basic skills.

And what of the economic climate? While the outsourcing and IT services sector is feeling the fallout from the downturn in Europe and the US, the domestic sector is still booming. In fact there seems little prospect of any sustained slow-down in India's economic boom.

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