Everyone has heard the stories about the number of engineers / software technologists being turned out by the Chinese education system. Depending on who you believe, it’s somewhere between 400K and 1M each year. Of course, it also depends on exactly what you’re counting. The dirty little secret of the outsourcing industry, however, is that most of these graduates are not really ready to provide good service to global clients. The corollary to the dirty little secret is that the really good engineers tend to either work for leading domestic product development companies (think Huawei & Lenovo), or they head for the multi-national corporations - like Microsoft, Google, IBM & HP.

This leaves all of us in the outsourcing industry fighting over the rest of the resources, and also trying to figure out how to turn more of these graduates into suitable employees. Following the lead of Neusoft, there have been a rash of announcements regarding training institutes. We’ve set up the Symbio Software Institutes in Weihai. I just noticed that Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (TEDA) was setting up a pretty large scale training operation - you can check out the press release: “First Training Center for Outsourced Services in China Set Up in TEDA.” If the claims in their press release are to be believed, TEDA “promises to train 10,000 to 20,000 talented people every year for service-outsourcing companies in conformity with their requirements and will try to increase the number of people engaged in outsourced service in TEDA to between 50,000 and 60,000 by 2010.”

I believe that the leading Chinese software outsourcing companies do recognize the their human resources are really the most important elements for our companies. Further, they are doing everything that we can to ensure that they have great engineers to truly add value to clients.

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