India steps up to fight skills crisis

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 18 Oct 2007

In the absence of global trade liberalisation, bilateral and trilateral agreements, such as the India-Brazil-SA forum, are the only practical means to promote free trade, says Satyam Computer Services chairman Ramalinga Ragu.

Ragu was in SA as part of an Indian trade delegation for the second meeting of the forum. In that capacity he addressed presidents Thabo Mbeki and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, as well as Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Mbeki afterwards said the next summit should concentrate more on "yielding achievable outcomes on how to put issues related to social development on the global agenda", a view that Ragu shares.

Speaking at an informal media dinner last night, Ragu, who heads one of India's big-four IT companies, said key to making the initiative work was India sharing its IT know-how with its partners, SA and Brazil.

"Cooperation between SA, Brazil and India is vital, especially around the skills shortage," says Satyam country manager Chittaranjan Jena. "Skills building is something India can do, considering its skills and training infrastructure."

Where most IT companies are content to poach staff, Satyam has invested in skills development and training. Jena says the company has already employed and further trained close to 100 graduate South Africans at its Hyderabad campus.

The company plans to "aggressively" recruit next year. "We have another 30 leaving for Hyderabad in November," says Jena. "Next year we plan to recruit at least 30 graduates a quarter. We're also in the running for several large projects - two in the private sector and two in the public - and if we get some of them we could double our quarterly recruitment.

"We definitely want to make this programme available to a much broader student audience," Jena adds. "We have to publicise it more and share what the programme is about and our global career path for graduates."

The Satyam entry-level training programme lasts a year and consists of classroom work, as well as mentoring and on-the-job training.

The company employs around 45 000 IT professionals in 55 countries on six continents. It owns development centres in India as well as the US, Britain and a number of other developing and emerging countries. Raju and Jena anticipate establishing such a centre in Cape Town in due course.