Perhaps it's time for tech employers to think out of the box

When I started out in IT, just about anyone with a brain and a willingness to learn a programming language could break into the industry. I'm not going to say I was the greatest programmer in the world; I'm not one of these people who can crank out thousands of lines of flawless code every day. But what I did bring to the table was the ability to think like a user, develop user interfaces that were comprehensible, write specifications, communicate with users about their requirements, and other "soft skills" that in a wide-open job market were valued.

Today the situation is very different. Mr. Brilliant is a network guy, and in his last two job hunts, he encountered employment ads where the person sought would need all of his skills, web application development experience, database administration experience, graphic arts talent and experience, technical writing skills, and interpersonal skills. That person, of course, doesn't exist, but it provided a convenient way for employers to create a job description that no one could fill, thus enabling them to outsource the position, either by hiring H-1Bs or outsourcing the entire mess overseas.

But now it turns out that Bangalore isn't quite the skills Shangri-La it's been painted to be:

India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count. But their competence has become the issue.

A study commissioned by a trade group, the National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom, found only one in four engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations.

The skills gap reflects the narrow availability of high-quality college education in India and the galloping pace of the country’s service-driven economy, which is growing faster than nearly all but China’s. The software and service companies provide technology services to foreign companies, many of them based in the United States. Software exports alone expanded by 33 percent in the last year.

The university systems of few countries would be able to keep up with such demand, and India is certainly having trouble. The best and most selective universities generate too few graduates, and new private colleges are producing graduates of uneven quality.

Many fear that the labor pinch may signal bottlenecks in other parts of the economy. It is already being felt in the information technology sector.

With the number of technology jobs expected to nearly double to 1.7 million in the next four years, companies are scrambling to find fresh engineering talent and to upgrade the schools that produce it.

Some companies are training faculty members themselves, offering courses tailored to industry needs and improving college labs and libraries. They are rushing to get first choice of would-be engineers long before they have completed their course work. And they are fanning out to small, remote colleges that almost no one had heard of before. The country’s most successful technology concerns can no longer afford to hire only from the most prestigious Indian universities. Nor can they expect recent graduates to be ready to hit the shop floor. Most companies require in-house training of anywhere from two to six months.

Demand is beginning to be felt on the bottom line. Entry-level salaries in the software industry have risen by an average of 10 to 15 percent in recent years. And Nasscom, which helps companies wanting to outsource find workers, forecasts a shortage of 500,000 professional employees in the technology sector by 2010.

The fact of the matter is that today's information technology industry requires a mix of hard and soft skills that even the most highly-trained engineer may not have. Corporate reluctance to cross-train in specific languages and technologies results in a perception that the pool of qualified employees is smaller than it actually is. Companies don't want to cross train from Cold Fusion to ASP.NET. They won't cross-train from Oracle to SQL Server. They want five years of experience in technologies that have only been around for three years. They don't understand that just because Adobe Photoshop runs on a PC doesn't mean it's a programming language, and they don't understand that being able to use desktop application doesn't make you a techie. And they also don't understand that the person with the brain that's a sponge for arcane engineering concepts may not be the best person to develop specifications for software for mass use.

If there is a tech worker shortage in the United States (and I don't believe there is), it's because some have decided to leave an industry in which executives don't understand the many facets of effective information technology development and deployment. It's because they don't understand that most IT workers can be easily trained in new technologies. It's because they don't understand why workers who have to continually update their skills over the entire course of their careers are unwilling to work 80-hour weeks for the same pay that they could make scanning lumber at the Home Depot checkout counter. And it's because they just don't get that someone who understands basic computer science concepts and knows a few programming languages can easily learn the syntax of another. They don't understand that a person who can develop user interfaces that don't leave people scratching their heads doesn't need a technical degree from MIT. And they don't understand how the graphic artist who designs the look of their web site and the programmer who develops it may not be the same person.

The IT job market is run by people who don't understand IT. American tech workers have known this for the better part of a decade. Now Indian workers are beginning to understand as well.