Will ITeS do to us what oil did to WEST ASIA?!

I met a friend of mine some days back and conversation invariably boiled down

to the new mantra in business circles the great IT-enabled boom. He made a very

interesting remark that caught my fancy and therefore I have decided to make it

the title of my article

As a company which has been staffing in the IT sector for the past 6 years we

have witnessed all the booms (mainframe, ERP, Y2K, dot-com etc) but in each of

the booms the potential for large-scale employment was limited. It did have an

impact on the country in terms of export earnings and FDI inflows but it did not

look like giving jobs to the millions who graduate from colleges every year and

therefore in terms of impact it looked elitist. As our company gets into

staffing for this sector and I meet and review resumes sent by hundreds across

the country the sheer impact of this sector in employment generation has hit me.

Talking to fresh graduates has opened my eyes to the fact that despite so

much of development, getting jobs as a fresh graduate if you don’t have a

branded educational background (IIT/IIM etc) is very tough. To these freshers

this sector has opened a door which offers them starting salaries in the range

of Rs 6,000-8,000 per month. The good thing is that companies in this sector

prefer freshers as they fit in better culturally, and also don’t have very

high salary expectations.

The other thing that this sector can do is to give hope to the large

contingent of sales people in our country. There are so many sales and customer

support jobs which I call "dead-ends". These don’t add value to ones

resume as it doesn’t teach anything new and therefore the potential of getting

a break into a stable and paying job is highly limited. For these people jobs in

the IT enabled sector would enable them to pick up the skills, which they can

call specialized.

Often I am asked what are the prospects of growth in this sector and

prospective candidates say that they don’t want to spend the rest of their

life picking up phones/answering customer emails on the Internet. Let me

reiterate that growth in job content in any job happens only when the

company/business in which one is working grows. So if one applies the same logic

to ITeS one can see that there would be tremendous career growth if one were to

join this sector now. In fact at the risk of sticking my neck out I can say that

the growth in terms of content and responsibility would be comparable to what

the SW sector saw in the late nineties!

Good language skills are a must and this is where a lot of our students for

whom English is not the medium of instruction nor is it the spoken language will

face a problem. However there may be some pure transaction processing jobs that

don’t require interface with external customers. These jobs will of course

call for basic fluency in the language but don’t require the correctness of

accent or grammar that a voice based IT enabled service requires. This is the

most exciting part of this opportunity. Infact it has the capacity to employ

graduates who otherwise would have got themselves registered with the employment

exchanges!

I have been reading about the move to take these IT enabled centres into

smaller towns in India and away from the major metros and if that happens, it

would really galvanize the employment potential of this sector. There would be

issues of infrastructure/ telecom links which would be a barrier and the sooner

we can overcome that the faster our country can enjoy the full benefits of this

boom.

BY Gautam Sinha



The author is CEO of TVA Infotech.