It seems odd. In the worlds most populous regions, the biggest problem facing employers is a shortage of people.

While reading through a popular newspaper I came across an article on “Capturing Talent” that dealt with the skill shortage in Asian countries across industry verticals. The opening lines of this article unfurl a compelling story. “It seems odd. In the world’s most populous regions, the biggest problem facing employers is a shortage of people”.

This made me think of ‘reclamation’- a concept well known in the physical world of land and real estate. Land reclamation is a way to build and develop one’s physical assets. Similarly ‘talent reclamation’ is a way to build and develop the soft infrastructure of an enterprise. I see the next phase of reclamation happening around the softer component, namely, talent.

Grey revolution

Let us take India’s two key resources as examples - Agriculture and Manpower. “Green Revolution” that was an experiment undertaken during the period from 1967 to 1978 in India. It meant self sufficiency in food production by drastically increasing yield. The three basic elements were continued expansion of farming areas, double cropping of existing farmland and using seeds with superior genetics. The advent of technology has played a key role in developing this natural resource. In-depth research coupled with private sector investment in various technologies wrote the history of a very successful Green Revolution in India. The tractor, as an example, was the perfect technology that enabled investment, which in turn contributed in increasing the yield.

Talent or manpower as a resource in India is available in abundance today. With Human Resources, we are at the same stage today as we were with agriculture farm production post the independence era. The corporate world is facing an acute shortage of skilled labour. From ‘Green to Grey’- it is still a revolution in the making. A ‘Grey Revolution’ is gathering momentum in India.

Driving forces

Talent processing is next wave of opportunity to fuel the worldwide need for talent. New and emerging markets will lead this new talent based economy. And just as many core infrastructure projects in the area of telecom, transport and broadcast are funded by global consortiums; talent development would need similar global commitment and investment.

Talent Reclamation will happen with the right collaborative efforts of the enterprise and the academia that would trigger the change to build an education based talent economy. The education based talent economy is going to be fork lifted by the three pronged effort of the academia, media and telecommunications network that has been growing vigorously in the last decade or so in India. The overall enabler is going to be technology.

Technology

In much of the industrialised world, television is a big part of the public consciousness. Even in India, television networks are penetrating the remote interiors of the country. This by far is a great digital railroad that could connect corporations with the vast pool of human talent. Organisations can create an ecosystem of television programming about jobs, careers. A close corollary to this was special programme on agriculture training and development more popularly known as “Krishi Darshan” aired by Doordrashan. The need is to take the same model and run it on the talent resource of the country.

The telecommunications industry has also been building up and providing the much needed bandwidth which is essential for connecting the widely dispersed dots on the talent map of India. Today this service comes at a very affordable entry level price of Rs.100 a month which is by all comparisons the cheapest telecom service in the world. As this network grows, every single connection is transferring information power to a large talent pool of people in India. Technology today has given rise to the possibility of transmitting short broadcast television episodes to be viewed on cell phone screens.

Into the future

This convergence of broadcast channels, the internet and wireless telecom networks will provide the technology framework for talent reclamation in emerging economies like India. Learning, especially virtual universities are best poised to lead that change. Today, India has an edge in the IT industry specifically, and is expanding to other verticals of manufacturing, retail, biotechnology, etc. Its inherent competitive advantage has been the availability of a large educated and skilled workforce. For an emerging economy like ours to retain its global edge, we must continue to be the perfect ground for global knowledge and local intelligence to come together and create new business models to build an economy for the 21st century that is talent based.

The writer is Director, Developer Support Microsoft Global Technical Support Centre, India.