Job-hopping engineers hinder India's R&D ambitions

Silicon India
Bangalore: Job-hopping these days is a frequent occurrence among engineers in India. This is limiting the scope of development of cutting-edge technology and cranks the R&D operations in the country.
"The job-hopping tendency of Indian engineers is a stumbling block in the path of gaining deeper technical knowledge," said Rick Steffens, Head of Hewlett Packard's Systems Technology and Software Division. As reported in Reuters,he also opined that the country should make it attractive for the engineers to stay within rather than shifting to tech multinationals.

The absolute value of the engineers in the country is low though the talent pool is large. "If you look at experienced talent, the people who have spent 15-25 years in product development, that bench is still thin in India," said Noshir Kaka, Director at McKinsey & Co, a global consultancy firm.

However, some researchers say that the curriculum followed by most of the engineering schools in the country is neither industry oriented nor made for R&D needs. The country's educational system does not support academic or research excellence and lacks good faculty and infrastructure. "The total output of Ph.Ds in India is probably about the same as that of a single good university in the U.S.," said Guruduth Banavar, Head of IBM's India Research Laboratory. "And the best folks who could potentially go on for Ph.Ds end up taking jobs because there are so many good jobs available," he said.

The lack of educational standards in India limits not only the scope of collaboration between the Indian counterparts of the technology companies but also higher-value R&D efforts. Vivek Mansingh,Country Manager, Dell India said, "I think in the future a lot of that interaction will move here and standards bodies will form here."