Recently I got to read a news on SI that Telecom sector in India is going to add 1 Lac more people in coming years. This is the most welcome news. After being hit by recessions in all other sectors and especially in IT, the rate at which the recruitment fell off is dramatic. But in spite of all these things, the news of crunch of manpower is the most welcome news.

Recently in Telecom India, so many new companies have got the license to operate is some or other state of India. Some of them are having PAN India License. After entry of so many players in Telecom, the real question remains. How far will the competition go? How these new players are going to establish themselves? From where will they get people to operate? And so on.

The best answer to the last question is, poach as many people as you can from existing and well established players. And this is what these new players are doing. The existing players like Airtel, Voda, Idea and Reliance who are having the base of operation for all over India are targeted by these new players. And the way they are hitting these companies are very bad. In Delhi where Aircel is about to launch the network in coming month, it is poaching as many people from these existing player like there is no tomorrow. But how long will it go? What will be the end result of this poaching thing? So many other players have to launch their network, what will happen then?

The best answer is not known. But I have some thoughts to tackle this issue. We need a vision to generate the talent pool as per the requirement. We should have planned this before also. Some of remedies I think could be:

We need partnership programs with best of the engineering colleges in India. This aspect is the most neglected aspect in India. The industry-academia partnership can yield many things and we are only limited by our shortsightedness and nothing else. Our telecom leaders in India might have seen this crunch situation in nascent age of telecom industry or they might not. We would like to develop special graduate programs to groom people at early stage of career. We need some industry specific programs like what we have in Computer Science with good partnership with existing operators.

When industry is looking for highly skilled people, fresher is not a good option. But remember the fact that well groomed and methodically taught fresher are the best option when we have no other option. Basically we can't recruit people from Computer Science or Mechanical Engineering nor from MCA or BCS etc. This limits the resources of industry to an great extent. We could only hire people having some specific background of industry or some specific knowledge like Telecom or Communication or Electronics engineers. And there are not many options.

Recently Bharti has tied up with IIT Delhi to offer a Masters Course work in Telecom, but that attempt is very insignificant one and we need many more such initiatives to tackle the issue.

One way often cited and followed by majors like Airtel is outsourcing. But in one way or other, this is not a solution. Let's say you have outsourced the Networks operation to Nokia, but will it guarantee that your network is world class? From where Nokia will recruit people to support such tasks? There are so many local companies in India, who have undertaken the tasks of Nokia and Ericsson to support the network services of giants like Airtel, Voda etc. In short at the end, outsourcing will depend on how these local companies are providing the best solution to network issues and many times they themselves are incapable of it. So outsourcing is no panacea for manpower crunch.

Poaching creates a big hole in existing operator company when people leave. And filling up so many holes is not an easy task, as many of existing players have anti-poaching agreement among them. So how to acquire new talent is the next big question faced by existing operators, and as I said unless you had a better plan for future recruitments, you would end up in outsourcing to avoid getting involved into this issue. And of course this is not a solution!