Short essay on expanding Career Opportunities in India

The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey conducted in June 2005 forecast positive employment prospects for the July-September quarter of 2005. Carried out for the first time in India, the survey is based on interviews with 2,488 employers across the country.

According to Mr. Soumen Basu, Chairman of Manpower India, the aim of the study is to create awareness and provide a research base to the employers. Mr. Basu said in June 2005 that a copy of his report would be given to the Planning Commission.

The sectors covered under the survey are: finance, insurance, and real estate; manufacturing; mining and construction; public administration and education; services; transportation and utilities; and wholesale and retail trade.

Employers in the services sector, including the information technology and IT-enabled sector, indicated the highest demand for an increase of 44 percent employees, followed by finance, insurance and real estate at 41 percent, Growth in the transport and utilities industry would be just 17 percent.

The sectors surveyed include the private and public sector undertaking and industrial houses with a significant contribution to gross domestic product (GDP). Fully based on inputs from the organized sector, the survey included multinational companies also.

The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey is conducted quarterly to measure employers’ intention to increase or decrease the number of employees in their workforce during the next quarter.

The employment field in India has undergone and is undergoing a sea change with a wide range of opportunities open to youngsters in various fields. Never before in India’s history have we seen such an interaction between the employers and the potential employees. It has been a two-way street. MNCs, manufacturing concerns. IT majors, IT- enabled services and others need the right kind of professionals and others as much as the youngsters need the right kind of openings in different fields.

The old kind of recruitment is passed. Gone are the days when one applies for a job and waits eternally for an interview, medical examination and other unending formalities. Today interviews are fixed just on the basis of ads or even through walk in interviews or teleconferencing. And there are campus selections and career fairs organized at regular intervals in different cities.

Institutions-both government and private-are offering courses in subjects off the beaten track. Everyone knows that change is the only constant factor and survival depends upon acting or reacting to the way winds blow in the fields of education and job opportunities.

Did we ever dream just two decades ago that job avenues would be opening up through sheer knowledge management and reduction in interaction costs? The New Millennium optimizes talent globally through remote services. Any activity that does not require face-to-face interaction between a service and its receiver is good for remote processing. The market potential for remote service is currently around $120 billion and is expected to grow to a whopping $250 billion.

IT-enabled services promise a million jobs a year and web-based business models will mould the future, throwing up widening horizons for outsourcing operations that would be managed remotely. An unending, vast territory is open for you-medical transcription, data entry, design services, accounting and financial services, network management, research services, data search and analysis, website services, monitoring services, secretarial services and the like.

Some of the fresh avenues of employment that have emerged in recent times have been medical transcription, call centers based on business process outsourcing, insurance claim processing, back office operations, etc.

Many companies are employing graduates fresh from colleges or universities, training and orienting them to meet the demands of the jobs that they are required to perform. The universities must change according to the changing demands of the times, the needs of industry and needs of employment potential. Let the syllabus be modified to help the students find jobs of the ‘new wave’.

Compared to a mere 75,000 software engineers emerging in the US, a top high 1.2 lakh software professional enter the employment field in India every year. The number of low-end software technicians has already crossed a million. The software industry is growing at the rate of 50 percent per annum and IT exports account for 30 percent of the total exports. And there is a rush for IT-MBAs.

We no longer talk of just hospitals, but talk only in terms of multi- specialty hospitals and such hospitals that pay hefty salary to the specialists are mushrooming in big and small cities. With tourism of different brands like ecotourism, pilgrimage tourism and heritage tourism, we have added one more brand-health tourism.

Foreigners are coming to the multi- specialty hospitals in India for better treatment and high-risk operations that cost one fifth of what they pay for in their countries.

In the two small cities. Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi in Kerala alone, there are more than 30 multi-specialty hospitals. There is a special wing in the Amritanandmayi Multi-Specialty Hospital in Kochi dealing with diabetic foot alone.

New fields like biotechnology and nanotechnology are fast emerging. More comforts mean more misery. You sit for hours together in your air conditioned room in the office and back home you pursue the same persistent sedentary style watching TV. And if you are not a victim of hypertension, diabetes or spondylitis, then something has gone wrong with your doctor’s diagnosis.

These ailments have opened avenues for dieticians and nutritionists who will tell you what to eat and when.

Poaching of pilots as more aircraft of new companies take to the skies in the wake of our “open skies policy” shows the dearth of pilots in our country. Many of our ace pilots of the IAF find lucrative jobs in private airlines after their retirement. With the opening of insurance sector to private players, our new against have to be tech-savvy wielding laptop and get going the aggressive way.

The boom in the credit and business has opened yet another field for those young adept in aggressive marketing.

Not every household gets all TV channels. But the number of channels is ever on the increase, providing scope for thousands of technician’s video graphs, sound recordists, make-up men, talented anchors, talk show hosts and artistes for the serials.

The banking and finance fields have seen traumatic changes in the form of mergers, acquisitions and the like, providing room for experts in finance. Financial managers are being hired to manage assets and investments, handle mergers and acquisitions, raise capital and assess global financial transactions.

The mobile revolution-the extensive use of mobile phones has opened up career opportunities for lacs of professionals and non-professionals there is cutthroat competition in the field with each player offering more scopes for the potential clientele. Only the dynamic among the youth can boost the sales and complement the aggressive ads.

Marketing is the byword today. Business managers would decide what news would go and what needs to be “killed”. Economic writer; are paid much more than those who write or edit news stories Advertisements in the print media and audiovisual media are the base or. Which the success of a periodical, a radio channel, a TV channel or a TV serial is built.

Sometimes it is seen more time is given for commercial break than for the serial. Ads in newspapers and magazines and visual ads have opened the floodgates of opportunities for hundreds of thousands of youngsters for different chores in the vast expanding ad business.

As India is poised to become an economic and knowledge superpower propelled by a leadership of great vision, the responsibility for carrying out the vision would largely depend upon our youth for whom the nation provides a vast and varied field. Here, they can perform their best in any field they choose. More opportunities would emerge for them with the passage of time.