Large Pool of Professionals

India has a growing bank of 4.1 million technical workers, supplied by, among others, over 1,832 educational institutions and polytechnics, which train more than 67,785 computer software professionals every year. The NASSCOM study undertaken in April 1999, highlighted the following facts:

The number of software professionals employed have increased to 2,50,000 in 1998-99 compared to 2,00,000 in the preceding year. This includes software professionals in non-commercial organisation as well as software development units in user organisation.

Almost 67% of the software professionals employed in the industry were in software development and operations, 3% in domain expertise development, 11% in marketing and relationship development, 15% in client support and 4% in other activities.

The overall median age of the software professionals was about 26.2 years. 77% of software professionals in software companies were men, whereas 18% were women.

However, this ratio is likely to be 65:35 (male: female) by the year 2003.

There was an average of 21% rise in basic salary in 1998 over the previous year.

The skills in demand were in the area of business applications of software development, quality assurance, technical writing, telecommunications, networking, RDBMS, Y2K tools and practices, E-Commerce, Java, ERP, Interactive Integration Services, Datawarehousing, Internet, and Client-Networking.