News & Views item - October 2006

 

 

The Headline Reads "Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom..." (October 19, 2006)

     On July 19, the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop in addressing the Sydney Institute referred to Australia suffering a likely short-fall of as much as 35% in its estimated requirement of 55,000 additional scientific professionals (just over 19,000 individuals) within six years. How to overcome the shortfall; is India an answer?

 

She suggested that she was dealing with the matter and went on to tell the Sydney Institute, "...CSIRO will increase its investment in its early to mid career researchers with an additional 40 new postdoctoral fellows and an additional 10 new CSIRO Science Leaders. The CSIRO Science Leader Scheme is directed to high performing scientists with between 5 and 10 years post-doctoral experience. This increased investment  will amount to $18.3 million over three years and provide important career  opportunities to Australian researchers."

 

No, CSIRO wasn't to get additional funding it would divert the funds in its current allocation to this initiative.

 

And earlier this month the Prime Minister, John Howard, announced that over four years $56 million would be allocated for 500 additional Commonwealth-supported places in engineering courses at Australian universities.

 

What was that figure for the estimated shortfall? No doubt about it "the country's in the very best of hands".

 

Of course one suggestion is that the short fall could/would in significant part be made up by immigration from India.

 

Well, will it?

 

Somini Sengupta recently filed a report to The New York Times from the Indian town of Tiruchengode in Tamil Nadu, population 80,000 and the cite of one of India's numerous technical colleges, this one founded by a local textile magnate.

As its technology companies soar to the outsourcing skies, India is bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers, a shortage looms.

Ms Sengupta had accompanied a four man team from India’s largest software company, Tata Consultancy Services. The company "plans to add 30,000 people to its current work force of 72,000. So it was that on a recent afternoon the team roamed the halls of In the end, the Rangasamy college... with the goals of selecting its next generation of software programmers and assessing how, in the short term, the company could help the college churn out more of what it needed. 'These are the guys who are going to write my Windows 2010,' as one of the recruiters put it."

 

And the nub of the problem is while India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last count, their competence is the issue in that "a study commissioned by a trade group, the National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom, found only one in four engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team or deliver basic oral presentations."

 

In fact "Nasscom, which [also] helps companies wanting to outsource find workers, forecasts a shortage of 500,000 professional employees in the technology sector by 2010.

 

Unfortunately Tata Consultancy Services' representatives decided in the end, that Rangasamy college did not fit the company’s bill. The team found deficiencies in the way basic subjects were taught and deemed the students to be average.

 

So much for importing engineers and "scientific professionals" from India.

 

Now you might think that the Federal Government is going to significantly beef up the output of local talent. Well ,perhaps, but if Monash University is an indicator it doesn't appear all that likely. Its IT faculty has shed something like 150 staff in the last two years.  And this is the area that Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan is touting as the driver of increased productivity in Australia for the coming decade.

 

Particularly disturbing is that this appears to be symptomatic funding structure for tertiary education that is in crisis.

 

And on top of it all TFW recently got the following comment from an academic reader on reading Minister Tells Unis, "Stop whinging and please don't bother us, thank you."

As far as I can tell the word "handout", when used in conjunction with money, implies that it is a donation or gift i.e. not in return for any goods or services. If Ms Bishop says that Unis are asking for "handouts" this appears to betray her thinking that Uni's don't produce anything useful (despite her assertion that the states are the beneficiaries of something or other)

 

Ms Bishop has the cheek to claim that the states have tied up the Uni's in red tape. I haven't come across any state-inspired red tape in my day to day work, but I can tell you that the red-tape inspired by Canberra continues to grow without bound. And it filters down to the lowest level.