Semiconductor industry to face manpower shortage

Bangalore, Jan 10 (UNI) The Computer hardware industry in India will face a worse situation in the next few years in finding generic talent and the Semiconductor industry need to live as attempt to increase the supply chain would take at least four years to be visible.

This was the focal point of discussion at the a HR leadership forum in the CEO's conclave in the VLSI conference 2007 that ended here today.

Ms Anita Ramachandran, CEO of Cerebrus Consultants, a leading HR firm in the country participating in the discussions, said the main challenge before the industry was almost a 100 per cent difference between the salaries offered by the semiconductor sector and for management graduates. While the average entry salary offered to top MBA graduates was over Rs.11 lakhs, the semiconductor sector offered around Rs 4-5 lakhs, she said.

She said the semiconductor industry was losing its talent primarily to overseas opportunities, though in the last year's trend had changed with investment bankers and business analysts increasingly looking at the technical talent and willing to offer salaries beyond imagination (salaries in IIT campuses are now touching or exceeding 14 lakhs per annum for the cream).

She said the sector could not take comfort in lower attrition rates as it hurt the companies more even if one person leaves due to higher lead time and training investment.

She said semiconductor companies need to recalibrate their view and thinking to ensure this was bridged and the challenge addressed effectively.

Mr Ranjan Acharya, Vice President HR of Wipro said talent was an integrated supply chain which consisted of the campuses, the internal and the customer interface. Each one was inter linked and companies that address this historically would have an advantage He said educational institutions which focus on linear thinking should go in for lateral thinking for innovation to happen. Ms Anita said there is a perception that the sector offered limited growth paths and opportunities were not that plenty, also the number of managerial options was limited in the sector which the companies need to work on.

She said there should be flexibility with on job training treated as academic requirement. Select development centres could be identified as educational institutions for this purpose, she added.

Prof Prasanna of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore said software courses should have hardware also as the line between the two was blurring. IIIT-B was currently running an experiment where one semester was divided into half of software and the rest half is for hardware.

VLSI has to be integrated into the IT or engineering curriculum he added.

UNI