TigerTraks Network

India will have job opportunities for 35 lac skilled manpower in the Electrical Equipment Industry by end 2012. This, as per the ministry of heavy industries and public enterprise is against around 20 lacs employed presently. The Economic Times reported this yesterday.

The ministry claims that the shortage of skilled manpower and labour productivity are the prime reasons for India severely lagging behind China and Korea in this industry. The ministry has also severely criticised Institutes for not being able to create the necessary manpower.

This is the exact problem which has been the inspiration for TigerTraks. While skilled manpower shortages exist in all areas, Team TigerTraks will attempt to work on the customer facing roles. We see three major areas for work :

1. Sheer increase in the number of people entering this industry. Unless we have many more people entering the industry, the industry competitiveness will not improve. This means that the industry has to become more attractive to the labour force.
2. Improve skill levels of people in the industry – technical, functional and behavioural ones.
3. Improve per person productivity. We routinely observe that per person sales productivity in the industry is dismally low, particularly in the small scale industries. This means small scale industries can never expect to compete with larger companies and will be always relegated to being marginal operators or OE suppliers to the industry.

What this means further is that Industry will have to invest in training manpower if it has to secure sustainability and competitiveness. This area can no longer be delegated to HR departments with objectives of 6 training days per year per employee. The business heads and heads of sales and marketing will have to focus on this as a crucial area of maintaining competitiveness.

A couple of weeks ago, I met a smart young talent – Minal Subhedar. She too felt this need and triggered off a thought that TigerTraks can be the catalyst in this Industry Institute partnership. Can we? Only time will tell. I will be meeting the heads of institutes and Industry in the next couple of weeks to discuss this point. Let us keep our fingers crossed.