IT JOBS BY THE THOUSANDS
The demand for qualified information technology (IT) professionals in India is as great as ever, if not greater. Tata Consultancy Service Limited (TCS), India's largest software company by sales, hired 70 000 people in the last fiscal year ended in March and plans to add 60 000 this year, mostly for IT positions, according to a TCS spokesman. Part of the reason is attrition, which The Economic Times reported recently reached its highest annual levels at TCS, Infosys, and Wipro in the year ended March 31 as a post-recession surge gave workers an opportunity to change jobs for raises of as much as 50 percent. To stem the exodus, TCS has offered raises to its IT professionals of 12 to 14 percent, the highest in three years. Infosys is expected to match that offer this fiscal year. TCS also plans to add 900 employees to its operations in China, while Infosys is expected to triple the number of its employees in China to 10 000 over the next three years. IBM is expanding its IT services in India by partnering with colleges and universities such as Karpagam College of Engineering and Sri Krishna College of Engineering & Technology. IBM says the program is part of a strategy to help students develop IT skills as undergraduates, making them and IBM more competitive as the company expands its presence in smaller cities across India. IBM is also looking for engineers with a variety of skill sets to staff vacancies in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Bangkok, and Jakarta.
GETTING SOFT ON SOFTWARE?
The Indian government wants to expand the country's role in the high-tech market beyond its already established strengths in IT services, with a goal of developing actual electronic products. Plans are still sketchy at this point, but one very real possibility is building at least one, and possibly two, semiconductor fabrication facilities in the country under an evolving policy framework that would give preference to domestically produced electronics goods in government procurement. "There is still lots of support in India for IT, but slowly, there's more attention to other areas, like RF and microwave technology," says Shiban Koul, the chairman of Astra Microwave Products Limited, a company with 700 employees that designs, develops, and manufactures components and sub-systems used in defense and telecom applications. Koul is also a professor at the Centre for Applied Research in Electronics at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (ITT Delhi). Koul says he's seeing more young people in India leaving IT jobs and returning to school to focus on technologies of personal interest. "They want to develop hardware products. They don't see an opportunity for [personal] growth in IT." Much of this effort is being spearheaded by IIT Delhi's Technology Business Incubator Program, part of the Foundation for Innovative and Technology Transfer (FITT), a larger umbrella program established to provide a clear interface between the university and India's high-tech industry. Koul says the FITT currently operates 15 centers to coordinate and award start-up grants from industry. "They also give you office space. But you have to show proof of opportunity in your project." Like India, China is leaning more toward hardware development and is going more commercial. Hong Kong Trader reports that the western region of the country, with its large population of electronics engineers trained in military technologies, has shown an interest in expanding into civilian applications. The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), meanwhile, is replacing the IT proficiency test introduced more than a decade ago with a new IT course. Starting in 2012, all CUHK students must complete the one-unit IT foundation course in their first year at the school.
LOOKING AT AUSTRALIA
Australia, meanwhile, has become a growing hub of IT activity, with 19 000 open IT positions at this point, according to Michael Heimlich, an associate professor of electronics engineering at Macquarie University. "It's not likely these [job openings] are going to be filled from internal sources," says Heimlich. Heimlich estimates that most of the demand for EEs in the defense sector is in the Sydney area. (In June, Northrop Grumman signed an agreement with the Australian Department of Defence to jointly identify opportunities for smaller Australian companies to compete for work within Northrop's global supply chain.) With information and communications technologies (ICT) accounting for almost 5 percent of Australia's gross domestic product (GDP), Anthony Wong, president of the Australian Computer Society, believes more focus is required on ICT education to ensure skills shortages do not continue to hold the country back. Wipro, India's third largest IT services company, said in June that it planned to double its Australian workforce over the next three years, mostly with university graduates. "Most of the technology professionals working in Australia are trained in country, although some are recruited regionally," says Kamran Ghorbani, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University). Currently, Ghorbani says, there's a push at the university level for boosting the skills of EEs, especially those interested in designing and developing microwave/RF systems for military applications. "There's less interest in hiring people in the telecom area as these systems are fairly well built-out across the country at this point." (This year's Asia Pacific Microwave Conference will be held in Melbourne, 5-8 December.) Hoping to attract more engineers and other tech professionals from India and other countries, the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) recently introduced a program that requires filing a document called "Electronic Expression of Interest." To participate, engineers and scientists (the target group also includes medical doctors, nurses, and others) can file the document, which would then be registered and ranked on a point system based on the applicant's biography, occupation, work experience, and English proficiency level. Applicants would then have to be invited by the DIAC to submit a visa application. Under the program, 113 850 Australian work visas can be granted in 2010-2011. New Zealand's most recent claim to fame is the software start-up activity in Wellington, the nation's capital city, which has attracted the attention of several leading venture capital organizations and job seekers. Semiconductor & Electronics Industries in the Philippines (SEIPI), the largest organization of foreign and local companies in the Philippines, has taken the lead in working with member-companies to fill their human resources requirements. SEIPI recently listed more than 200 engineering jobs in the country, ranging from entry level to management positions. Malaysia has its own issues. Fabian Kung Wai Lee, an engineering professor at Malaysia's Multimedia University, says the standard curriculum for engineering undergraduates in Malaysia is generally not sufficient to prepare engineering graduates to handle the challenges of working in some specialized areas of electronics. RF and microwave engineering is one example. He said universities and the Malaysia government have been working together to put more emphasis on these and other skill sets, and are working with industry to provide post-grad short courses and on-the-job training (OJT) for graduating engineers. "More post-university training and people with postgraduate degrees are needed," says Lee. Agilent Technologies Malaysia has been conducting annual recruitment drives locally and overseas (Australia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and U.S.), and has programs for internships and engineering students in their final year of school to work in R&D, electronic test, IC design, product engineering, quality, networking, packaging, and materials. Generally, Agilent Technologies has 150 employment opportunities across Asia, according to Franklin So, the company's Asia marketing manager. "Our first objective is to look for qualified individuals," says So.
APAC ENTREPRENEURS HEAD FOR HOME
One development that could open up new job opportunities in the APAC region is that skilled immigrants, including many of those trained in the U.S., are returning home, mostly to India and China. The main reason, according to Vivek Wadhwa, director of research for the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commecialization at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, is that new economic opportunities are opening up in those countries. A survey conducted jointly by Duke, the University of California-Berkeley, New York University, and Harvard, also indicates that many immigrants trained in the United States are lured by family ties, and--to a much lesser extent--frustration with their visa status, a reference to the H-1B temporary visas for immigrants, which have been in high demand in the U.S. for several years. (Several U.S. senators, including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, reintroduced legislation in March that would allow immigrant entrepreneurs to receive a two-year visa if they can secure $100 000 in start-up financing from qualified investors. After two years, the start-up must have at least five employees and $500 000. The new proposed law, the StartUp Visa Act of 2011, is an expansion of the Kerry-Lugar StartUp Act of 2010. The proposed bill is now in a Senate committee.) The four universities surveyed 153 skilled immigrants who had returned to India to start companies and 111 who went back to China. The result was that more than 60 percent of Indian and 90 percent of Chinese returnees said the availability of economic opportunities in their countries was a major factor in their return. Surprisingly, 72 percent of Indian and 81 percent of Chinese returnees said that the opportunities to start their own businesses were better or much better in their home countries, potentially opening up new jobs for engineers and other technical professionals in those countries. Government incentives weren't at all important for the Indians surveyed, but did lure back 23 percent of the Chinese. The university team also found that 52 percent of all startups in Silicon Valley from 1995 to 2005 were founded by immigrants. If those numbers hold up, Wadhwa says, "There won't be more jobs for Americans, just fewer startups in the U.S. and more abroad." There's no hard data available on how many skilled immigrants have already left the United States, but Wadhwa estimates that 150 000 have returned to India and China, each, over the past two decades. He says the trend has accelerated dramatically over the past five years with tens of thousands now returning home every year. And it's having an impact on recruiting and retaining technical professionals in the region. "There is indeed fierce competition for talent in both India and China--as bad as here," says Wadhwa. "The education systems of both countries are equally weak and the vast majority of graduates are not employable in the tech sector." Also, according to Wadhwa, "China is dependent on returnees and on expatriates for its R&D. India has learned to re-educate its graduates." (India has a running start with the formation of the Entrepreneurship Development Cell in January 2007 to promote entrepreneurship among students of IIT Delhi.) The Chinese Ministry of Education estimates that the number of overseas Chinese who returned to China in 2009 having received a foreign education reached 108,000, a sharp increase over the previous year, and jumped to an all-time high of 134,800 in 2010. A significant percentage of these studied in the United States. Wadhwa says another survey of 1224 foreign nationals who were studying at U.S. universities in 2009, or who had just graduated, revealed they believed that the United States was no longer the destination of choice for professional careers. "Most did not want to stay for very long."
Ron Schneiderman is a contributing editor for Electronic Design and Vision Magazines, and a regular contributor to IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
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