Reshaping Asia's Tech Talent Pool

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Before the dot-com bust, everybody wanted to become an IT person," says Sandy Walsh, manager of education programs in Cisco Asia-Pacific. Whereas today "it is a big challenge for the IT industry to make sure that we still attract bright and interested people into the market."

At the same time, technology workers with real-world experience are in strong demand. "Our hiring managers would say they're not satisfied with the supply," says Charles Caldwell, human resources director for Asia Pacific at Juniper Networks. "Obviously there's a talent shortage. It's a red-hot market. People are hiring."

Industry in the classroom
Asian businesses are increasingly turning to universities, which in turn feel pressure from both business and government to make their courses more relevant to the business environment.

"Everywhere across this region," notes Walsh, "academic organizations are being asked to go out and engage with the industry more."

Collaboration between corporations and universities can take several forms. A company might donate industry software, hardware and teaching materials. This summer SAS provided data-mining software and related funding to Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. In May 2005 Juniper Networks donated security solutions and routing platforms worth about $4 million to Tsinghua University in Beijing.

In many cases companies send employees into the classroom. "We have Intel engineers come in to the universities and co-teach it with the professors," says Loo Cheng Cheng, the chipmaker's higher education manager for the Asia Pacific.

Intel wants students to know how to optimize programs for its multicore platform, and hands-on lab work is essential to that. "In the past you had project work that is pretty superficial in terms of the lab experience. We're working with the universities to change that," says Loo.

A company might offer suggested curriculums, which universities can borrow from as they see fit. These suggestions are based partly on what stage a market is at in its development. In Laos for instance Cisco encourages training on core fundamentals, while in Australia it emphasizes emerging technologies like VoIP and wireless networking security.

Cisco started with basic networking curriculums back eight or nine years ago.

"As the market has developed around the world, we've found we needed to add additional curriculum to the program to meet what the industry demanded, and what the graduates needed to have to be successful getting into the workforce," explained Walsh.

Clearly, companies have more in mind than altruism when it comes to assisting a university. An ulterior motive might be to help cement a market lead, for instance, or ensure that enough people are familiar with its brand of technology. "This is not just a good seeding ground, but also an excellent brand-building platform," notes Sharma of Arthur D. Little.

While companies may have a genuine interest in improving the overall talent pool, their main objective no doubt is to help to develop a pool quality graduates to potentially recruit from.

Cisco was one of the pioneers in university-corporation cooperation. In the early days, says Walsh, "there was certainly resistance and suspicion about why we would give away programs for free. But clearly for us if we are successful at building a trained and educated workforce ... then that helps our business, it helps our customers and our partners, and it generally helps the business environment."

Not all universities are immediately receptive to outside help. Liu of Worksoft notes that many of China's top universities are reluctant to tamper with their curriculums. For this reason Worksoft seeks its fresh recruits primarily from lesser-known, more flexible institutions, such as the Beijing Information Technology College.

These schools are more likely to participate in vendor programs like IBM's Academic Initiative, which cover a lot of practical courses, like Java programming, C++ programming and network administration.