Anthony D'Costa posted:
*Silicon India
Talent crunch in realty industry forcing manpower import*
*Date:* Thursday, June 26, 2008
New Delhi: Three years ago, when Singaporean Jeff Teng was approached by a
headhunter for an architect's job in India, he turned it down. But a year
later, he decided to join the "India-calling fever" - as Teng puts it - to
work with Ansals API at a "lucrative package".
"I was reluctant at first, but the opportunities and salaries offered by
them (Indian developers) are amazing," Teng told IANS.
Teng's is not a solitary case. As demand for specialised professionals
soars
in India, a host of project planners, civil engineers, architects and
landscape architects have begun flocking here from countries such as
Singapore, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand on handsome salaries.
================================
And:
Beyond brain drain
The Economist
Jun 24th 2008
Human capital increasingly votes with its feet
THERE has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth lately, especially in
America, about the harm globalisation causes to workers, who are
increasingly worried that their hard-learned skills will become obsolete as
their jobs are shipped overseas.
But globalisation is also proving an exciting opportunity for a growing
number of workers who are seizing the chance to work abroad. This is not
confined to the stereotypical blue-collar migrant worker, such as the
Mexican builder in America or Polish plumber in Britain; it includes a
rapidly increasing number of highly-educated "knowledge workers" too.
The extent to which human capital is voting for globalisation with its feet
is made clear by two surveys published on June 24th by Manpower, a global
employment-services firm. The first, "Relocating for Work," polled over
31,000 workers; the second, "Borderless Workforce," surveyed 28,000
employers, each in 27 countries. (While Manpower's overall conclusion about
the globally mobile workforce is enthusiastic, its report on these surveys
recognises the dark side of mobility by highlighting two
corporate-citizenship initiatives that the firm supports, one to combat
human trafficking, the other to provide education for refugee children.)
Some 78% of the workers surveyed (most of whom have professional skills or
qualifications) said they would consider moving to get a good job-some 40.5%
would move permanently. While many of them would only relocate within their
home country, others were open to moving to countries nearby, and some 36.9%
said they would consider going anywhere in the world.
Although the employers surveyed say that the most sought after category of
worker is "labourer"-thanks to an infrastructure-building boom, especially
in developing countries-the next few categories are highly skilled:
engineers, then production operators, technicians, IT staff and sales
representatives.
Educated workers are more willing to relocate. Of those surveyed who had
less than a high-school education, 62.2% were open to moving for a job, and
28.4% had actually done so. Among those with an undergraduate degree, that
rose to 85% and 46.5%, and for those with a masters degree, to 87.4% and
60.7%. Their motivation? Better pay, obviously, cited by 81.8%, and career
advancement (73.6%), but also the opportunity to experience a different
culture (51.4%) and learn another language (47.4%).
Employers say that China is their favourite country from which to recruit
foreign workers, and India comes third, which will no doubt play to the
worst fears of the economic nativists in rich countries. But second on the
list of source countries is America, with Britain fourth, followed by
Germany, Japan, Spain, France and Canada. The only other
less-than-fully-developed country on the list is Poland, in tenth place.
Despite building walls on its southern border and reducing the number of
visas for foreign employees, America remains workers' destination of choice,
followed by Britain, Spain, Canada and Australia. The United Arab Emirates,
particularly Dubai, is the top emerging economy on the list, in sixth place.
The shift of workers abroad used to be called "brain drain". But Manpower
argues that this scarcely captures the complexity today's increasingly
globalised "market for talent". It proposes a lexicon of no less than six
categories of brain mobility.
Along with brain drain, which is when a country loses more educated brains
than it can replace, there is the even more negative "brain waste": when
people go abroad to do work that pays better but is less skilled than what
they would do at home.
"Brain export" is the more positive version of drain and waste. This happens
when educated workers leave their home countries but more than pay for their
absence through remittances, technology transfer and boosting their native
countries' workforce when they return.
"Brain globalisation" is simply the recognition that international mobility
of skilled human capital is now an integral part of life in multinational
companies and the global economy. "Brain circulation" refers to skilled
workers moving between countries to ply their trade. "Brain exchange" is
when multinational firms move skilled workers between their operations in
different countries-having cosmopolitan workers, especially executives, is
increasingly seen as a competitive advantage in leading global companies.
Your columnist can't help thinking that Manpower should have used its
considerable brain power to come up with a few phrases that did not include
the word brain. But the firm's point is well made. In today's global
economy, you cannot have too many brains-especially brains on planes.
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