First HR mantra: take care of your people

A little more than a year back I was having lunch with my jazz lover friend
Ranjan Chopra of Team Computers at Delhi's venerable India International
Center. I casually asked him about the number of employees he had in his
company. His answer: 832. And that too, he admitted, he had come to know just a
couple of days back.

His answer was quite surprising to me, as one would always expect a CEO or MD
to know how many people he has in the company he runs. No wonder, today the
industry is crying hoarse about the attrition levels in their respective
companies.

Asim Raina Editor

Without doubt, manpower is the biggest issue today concerning the channel
community. The strange part is that everybody is aware of this issue but
surprisingly, nobody is willing to stick his neck out and take the bull by its
horns. In other words, there are just not enough technically qualified people
available in the market today, notwithstanding the fact that India has one of
the largest base of highly-skilled, English speaking programmers and software
developers. The fact of the matter is they are there and yet they are not there.

As it is, today the inflow of new qualified manpower in the industry is very
low. On top of that, what is happening is that companies are snatching people
from one another. The problem is worst for the channels, as they have to face it
everyday. Reseller recruits a person, trains him who after some time joins the
distributor. After he further hones his skills there, vendor snatches him. As a
result, the reseller is left holding the can.

Another byproduct of this muddle is that the salary levels are going through
the roof, which in turn, is making hiring and retention extremely difficult.

So what needs to be done to come out of this muddle? The biggest thing which can
be done is that the industry needs to get closely involved with the academicia
in the technical institutes to ensure that what is being taught is absolutely
current and relevant to the needs of the industry. Only then the quality of
offtake will be good resulting in adequate availability of qualified people. The
other important factor is manpower retention and retraining. In this fast
changing cyber world, it has become imperative for companies to constantly
retrain their people so that they don't get obsolete. In addition, companies
have to devise newer and more innovative HRD policies to retain their people. It
essentially means that take care of your people and they in turn will take care
of you.