Infosys director warns of human resource crisis

The war for talent is hotting up as the services industry is all set to hire three lakh engineers from the available pool of 4.95 lakh in the next fiscal.

‘‘The IT industry itself will hire a million people in the next three years, thereby putting a great constraint on the supply side. If the number of engineering seats, including those in IITs and IIMs, is not increased substantially, there will be a big HR crisis,’’ said Infosys Technologies HR director T. V. Mohandas Pai.

Emphasising on the looming manpower crunch in the public sector units, especially banks, Pai said 3 lakh employees are going to retire in five years. Public sector units had not been hiring for the past 10 years and the average age of the public sector employee is 42 to 45 years.

If the government did not hire and train the employees now, it would become extremely difficult for it to get the quality manpower from private sector with escalating salaries, career growth, opportunities in the private sector. On the training front also, the government will have to struggle as the IT industry is spending as much as $2.6 billion on training and $5000 to train a single employee for 16 weeks.

Pai added that higher education is in a major crisis. ‘‘Average age of head of departments in colleges is 52 to 54 years, BTech graduates are teaching BTech undergraduates, staff shortage and limited number of seats are the major issues affecting the sector,’’ he said.