New Delhi: The world's largest software vendor Microsoft, which employs over 4,000 professionals in India, on Wednesday, said it was scaling up presence in the country but finds hiring just out-of-college IT engineers a problem.
However, the Redmond-based company suggested that imparting practical training could help overcome the dearth in availability of trained manpower.
"There is certainly a worldwide need for IT engineers and there are two issues. The first issue being, is the world able to apply the talent that is graduating from the Indian universities each year? About 25-30 per cent of the worldwide engineers graduate from India," Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft said in New Delhi.
"The other situation is to ensure that when somebody comes out of the university, (whether) they are immediately employable by the companies seriously doing IT works (as) sometimes that requires a little bit of training which people don't get in universities. The fact that I highlighted this (is) because we see that an issue in India," he said.
Ballmer said Microsoft is doing its bit to remove this problem through training that would make engineers employable.
Microsoft, which has the largest R&D centre in India outside Redmond has continuously grown its presence in India.
But Ballmer did not give any specific headcount figures that is up for increase.
"We are scaling up our team in India. Our R&D, global support, customer service team are growing dramatically in India. India deserves a lot of my attention as I see the growth with economy, vitality, mobility, PC market all are growing," he said.
Earlier the Microsoft CEO called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran. While Ballmer is believed to have discussed with Singh, the growing importance of India and Indians in Microsoft, he shared with Maran, what he thinks were the broad opportunities and challenges in the IT industry.
"We discussed about the IT industry, IT user community, mobility, PCs and consumers in India as well as top and bottom of the economic pyramid. We discussed on the need for additional innovation, which will be helped by PC penetration. The minister gave his perspective on the innovation in software which will have an impact on the PC market," Ballmer said.
He agreed with the various reports indicating that India could face the problem of employable workforce in the IT industry.
Last year, Microsoft, during its chairman Bill Gates' visit, had announced an investment of $1.7 billion and doubling the head-count to over 7,000 in the next couple of years.
India's sunrise software and services industry is mostly export-led and clocked revenue of $23.6 billion and is slated to reach $29-31 billion this fiscal.
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