India faces outsourcing labor shortage

India is beginning to see a shortage of properly skilled labor in its back-office outsourcing industry and could fall short by a quarter million workers in four years, officials said Tuesday.

“The problem is not with the quantity, but with the quality,” Rajeeva Ratna Shah, a top official of the federal Planning Commission, which directs India’s economic strategy, said during an outsourcing conference in the southern city of Bangalore, the center of India’s high-tech industry.

Only a fraction of the 3 million graduates produced by India each year are ready to be employed in the outsourcing industry, with others needing several months of training, Shah said.

Scores of Western firms farm out office functions such as telemarketing, handling customer calls, payroll accounting and credit-card processing to countries such as India, where wages are low and skilled professionals are abundant.

Full Story: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/11836316.htm

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