A SHORTAGE of skills, rather than money, is the biggest stumbling block for India as it scrambles to sustain high economic growth.
As India rushes to build out its infrastructure, it's hampered by a shortage of skilled workers across a whole spectrum: from project managers, engineers, supervisors, to fitters, electricians, pipe layers and others.
Skills, not money, is India's hurdle
Now we have realized why we were stuck at a hindu rate of growth!!! We cant scale up because our schools are so busy cramming the kids on the ABC's that they have churned out vocationally useless people. And the best part, they dont still know!!!
When you use the phrase "labor shortage" or "skills shortage" you're speaking in a sentence fragment. What you actually mean to say is: "There is a labor shortage at the salary level I'm willing to pay." That statement is the correct phrase; the complete sentence and the intellectually honest statement.
ReplyDeleteIf you start raising your wages and improving working conditions, and continue to do so, you'll solve your “shortage” and will shortly have people lining up around the block to work for you even if you need to have huge piles of steaming manure hand-scooped on a blazing summer afternoon.
Re: Shortage due to retirees: With the majority of retirement accounts down about 50% or more, people entering retirement age are being forced to work well into their sunset years. So, you won’t be getting a worker shortage anytime soon due to retirees exiting the workforce.
Okay, fine. Some specialized jobs require training and/or certification, again, the solution is to raise your wages and improve benefits. People will self-fund their re-education so that they can enter the industry in a work-ready state. The attractive wages, working conditions and career prospects of technology during the 1980’s and 1990’s was a prime example of people’s willingness to self-fund their own career re-education.
Suzie, If you read the article carefully will realize it is not just the quantity but the variety that is in short supply. You dont get more skills by throwing more money, you get them by providing diversity in education to increase the supply. Wages are a market driven phenomena and will solve itself based on the supply and demand. If the engineering companies wanted to attract civil engineers defecting to IT they will need to figure a way which may or may not involve just wage hikes. But they will still not have enough civil engineers for the level of activities that are taking place. Wages also get set relative to the cost of goods in the economy, it cannot be benchmarked to some other country and thought of as being low.
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