| Cyberiade.it Anonymous Remailer 2007-02-15, 7:01 pm |
| Shyamal Majumdar | BS | February 08, 2007 | 10:56 IST
Peter Sands, Standard Chartered Bank's Global CEO, has a strong
connection with India in many ways. His mother was born here and
among many things that he has picked up in his 'motherland' is a
taste for South Indian delicacies.
So while the attendant keeps serving steaming hot idlis, Sands
says Stanchart may have its headquarters in the United Kingdom,
but is an Indian bank for all practical purposes.
It would be unfair to dismiss this as just another sales pitch
by a global CEO who is on a whistle-stop tour to India. Listen
to Sands: Stanchart employs 14,000 people in India compared with
1,400 in the UK. "So I am sometimes  when people in
India refer to Stanchart as a foreign bank," he says with a
laugh.
Sands' counterparts in many global companies would agree with
this as they are ramping up their employee strength in India
like never before. In quite a few cases, the Indian unit will
soon beat all other countries in terms of the number of people
employed.
Management consultants call it the growing Indianisation of the
global workforce. That may be a slight exaggeration to drive
home a point, but here are a few examples of this growing trend.
It didn't come as a surprise when Accenture's global CEO William
Green announced in India a fortnight back that the company is
planning to increase its employee strength to 35,000 (one-
quarter of its global workforce) by August 31 this year. Its
headcount in India will then be more than that in the US where
the company has around 30,000 employees.
The point to note is that the recruitment is not limited to BPO
alone and the company plans to recruit over two-thirds of the
new employees across all other practices, including business
consulting and technology services.
While 35,000 is a big number, it's still significantly less than
the over 50,000 employees that IBM already employs in India. IBM
has ramped up quickly, more than quadrupling its staff in India
over the past three years. This means that one in six of IBM's
workers all over the world is now based in India.
The reason is quite obvious. Several core IBM activities are now
run exclusively in India and its investment in staff in the
country follows a similar increase in sales to India-based
firms: IBM's sales in India are up 37 per cent year-on-year.
Or, take Cisco. The world leader in networking for the Internet
is planning to shift 20 per cent of its senior management to the
company's Globalisation Centre East in Bangalore. The process
has already been kick-started, with the transfer of its Chief
Globalisation Officer along with a seven-member team to
Bangalore.
Dell, another infotech major, employs more than 7,000 people in
India, its largest workforce outside the US, and within a couple
of years, the employees working in Dell in India will reach
around 10,000 to 12,000.
While most of the new hires will be for the company's call
centres, Dell also intends to hire for product testing and
possibly manufacturing jobs.
All these examples only validate the headlines on the front page
of a glossy brochure promoting a jobs fair in Santa Clara, USA,
which cried -- 'India is Hiring.' HR experts say the reason for
this lies in some plain numbers.
Labour cost savings for US-based companies operating in India
could shrink from 80 per cent to 40 per cent within a decade.
McKinsey estimates that 33 million young professionals with
university degrees and work experience now live in 28 low-wage
countries, compared with 15 million in eight high-wage nations,
including 7.7 million in the US.
The number of university graduates from the low-wage countries
is increasing at an annual rate of 5.5 per cent, compared with
just 1 per cent in the high-wage countries.
In fact, Forrester Research estimates that US employers will
move 3.4 million jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas by
2017. Those jobs will include positions in technology, finance,
life sciences, human resources administration and business
management.
HR experts say the wide variety of jobs nail the lie that
foreign companies are only recruiting call centre employees in
India.
They are recruiting from the IIMs in large numbers despite the
fact that Indian MBA salaries are now in the same range as those
offered to grads of the top US business schools. In 2005, the
average compensation of Harvard Business MBA grads was nearly
$175,000, up 11 per cent from the prior year. Stanford and
Dartmouth MBA grads averaged $150,000 salary packages last year.
Last year, Barclays Capital was the top recruiter last year at
the IIM-Ahmedabad, hiring 15 full-time grads -- their highest
ever from one management school. To put things in perspective,
Barclays doesn't have a BPO operation in India.
http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2007/feb/08jobs.htm
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