Discussion with Madan Padaki

Transcription

1 Discussion with adan Padaki Chief Executive Officer, erittrac Services. adan Padaki is the Co-Founder & CEO of erittrac Services. erittrac, an investee company of anipal Education Group (EG), is India's Largest Independent Skills Assessment Company. erittrac designs and delivers assessments to evaluate abilities, skills and knowledge for both corporate & individual customers. Since its inception in 2000, erittrac has assessed over 2 illion candidates for over 150 clients across industry verticals like IT, BPO, BFSI, Engineering, FCG, Healthcare, Retail, anufacturing, Public Sector Units and Education among others. INSEAD, Europe's Leading Business School has written a casestudy on erittrac and this is being taught at its Entrepreneurship courses - where adan is also a regular invited faculty. erittrac has also been featured extensively in a book on Entrepreneurship, titled "astering Business in Asia" - by Prof. Patrick Turner & Chris Boulton. Earlier, adan an engineer by profession started his career with Wipro Corporation - Fluid Power unit in Export Sales. Attracted by the booming IT industry, he moved to Infosys Technologies into a Product anagement & arketing role. After a year's stint, he went on to pursue a formal BA from S.P.Jain Institute of anagement & Research umbai. On graduating, he joined BFL Software where he was posted to Tokyo in a role that involved setting up the operations of BFL Software in Far East. adan, a speaker at many forums is actively involved with many entrepreneur groups and is also a member of TiE Bangalore. Tholons: What are the highlights of the "Engineering Talent Pool Report" undertaken recently? adan Padaki: The Engineering Graduate Talent Pool Report is the first of a series of efforts by erittrac to uniquely understand the profile of talent in engineering institutions, quantify the relevant skills, identify gaps in such a way that this can lead to significantly bridging the gap between the demand & supply of industry-ready recruits.

2 erittrac which has tested over 2 illion candidates over its 7-year history of assessing potential recruits for its clients - had taken a sample of test scores of 25,000+ Engineering Graduates across 800 colleges in India to analyze their performance in a test termed as the IT Abilities tests. This test has sections that test a candidate on Verbal Ability, Analytical Ability & Attention-to-Detail. As per industry-defined benchmarks, the overall through-put rates show that around 26% of all candidates meet the defined benchmarks on all the three abilities together. In another analysis, to understand the differences between employability in Tier I (etro) v/s Tier II cities, it was found that the through-put rates in Tier II cities was 2/3rd of that of a Tier I city. The report highlights the fact that the talent pool in India is diverse and heterogeneous and provides a ready data on the regions/hubs/states on employable talent pools. Tholons: How critical is the shortage of employable engineering talent pool in India? adan Padaki: According to estimates made by a report on Talent Pools by NASSCO- KPG, India will have a requirement of 1.12 million qualified, employable knowledge workers for the IT software and services related areas by 2009 and all estimates of supply (employable pool) indicates availability of 885,000. The demand-supply mismatch is then at around 235,000 qualified employable Engineers by India however has over 1600 Engineering colleges that produce 500,000 Engineering Graduates every year, and theoretically should not have any shortfall at all. The paradox lies in the number of employable engineers. At around 25% employability rate, the number of employable engineers falls drastically to 125,000-odd Graduates! Tholons: Is the domestic market posting stiff competition to the offshoring / outsourcing industry for engineering talent pool? adan Padaki: Indian domestic IT market hit revenues of US$ 8.2 billion in the current fiscal (FY2007) while the outsourcing/offshoring IT Services market was at US$ 18 Billion. Although the ratio of new jobs created in the respective segments will vary according to the demand and growth of the industry (and this is inclined more towards the outsourcing segment), the available engineering talent pool remains the same and both the industry segments will continue to vie for the same pool of talent. Given the rate of growth of the domestic market in India, we will be seeing quite a lot of competition for resources from this sector as well Tholons 2 of 5

3 Tholons: What would you suggest to improve the quality of talent available in India? Industry: adan Padaki: The quality of talent can be improved when all the stakeholders; Industry, Academia and Students, play an active role in improving it. There is a pressing need for industry to interact with institutions and appraise them on the specific skills that potential candidates are expected to possess. For instance, the significance of Communication Skills or Learning Skills in the IT sector is not understood in totality by a huge cross-section of students and therefore, there is an expectation mismatch Academia: Institutions in India have to benchmark themselves against those in advanced countries, in terms of practices, processes and curricula that could help output better quality of students. There should be an emphasis on the right skills that has to be imparted on a candidate. There is a need for efforts in matching specific strengths of the candidate with opportunities in the job market. Eventually, this means academia has to constantly keep up-to-date on industry expectations through industry interface initiatives. Institutions in regions contributing to the talent pool in huge numbers might do well to up the ante and reduce the variance in performances amongst its students. A balanced approach that lays equal emphasis on different abilities would yield better output. Students: Awareness levels, amongst the student community has to grow in line with industry expectations and they must re-examine assumptions about what attributes are valued in the job market and what attributes are not. As potential recruits, students need to appreciate the varying importance levels that different sections of industry accord to different skill sets and plan careers that match their individual strengths. Looking away from a purely academic achievement perspective, top ranking students need to devote significant efforts for all round performance improvements, including employability traits. This follows the finding that the throughput rates for candidates scoring highly in academics do not compare favorably with the overall average Tholons 3 of 5

4 Tholons: What are some of the other offshore locations that have sufficient talent pool to challenge India? What special skills do these markets bring to the table? adan Padaki: Software application development, and every set of skills that comes with it, has been considered India s core IT competency foundation. In the IT categories, India continues to dominate all Database Development and most Programming language categories (excepting C#), with the U.S. maintaining its own domination of the Systems & Network Administration and Technical Support categories. India dominates some skill areas to such a great extent that it s difficult to imagine them being unseated by smaller players in each of these areas; however, the tech world moves fast, and it s clearly impossible to predict where these developments will lead. However, when global firms like IB and Accenture suggest that the majority of their employee growth will take place in India and not North America it s hard not to jump to conclusions. However countries such as Philippines, Vietnam & China do have significant talent pools that can challenge the Indian talent pool in a few years, but by then the Indian industry will probably have evolved to move up the value chain to a higher level of services. Tholons: What is the typical spend by companies on recruitment and assessment? Is it different for ulti-national Companies (NC's) versus Indian companies? adan Padaki: It is estimated that within the Indian market, the total annual spend on recruitment is US$ illion. However, the recruitment spend by a particular company is subjective to various parameters such as the industry it belongs to, the company size, the growth prospects, the profitability etc. Assessment spend again varies across companies, depending on the recruitment plan for that year, skills sets being hired, etc. Typically, companies spend around 15-25% of their recruitment budget on assessments. We have not seen any difference in the approach to assessments and spend between NCs and Indian companies Tholons 4 of 5

5 Tholons: What are some of the high demand services offered by skills assessment companies such as erittrac? adan Padaki: Skills assessments companies like erittrac provide end-to-end assessment services for Corporate like licensing of tests, online delivery engine for the administering the tests and test proctoring services across several cities in India. Apart from these testing services, erittrac also provides a gamut of recruitment process outsourcing services like managing the recruitment work-flow and engaging with the applicant right through the process. erittrac also provides solutions for employee assessments to measure resource allocations, training effectiveness, etc. erittrac also works with students, colleges & universities through a program called TracSkills which is an Individual Certification Program. In TracSkills, students take up a set of our standardized tests, get a report card which has a feedback on their performance and then apply to companies that accept these scores. In the last year, erittrac has assessed over 50,000 candidates in TracSkills itself. It is very critical for an Assessment company to be independent and avoid all conflicts of interests. erittrac is not into placements/sourcing or training so that we stay neutral Tholons 5 of 5