Its sheer population, coupled with sound government policies and an education system that emphasizes mathematics and science, have all contributed to the spectacular growth of India's IT industry.
According to Nasscom, India's national association of software and service companies, about 19 million students are currently enrolled in high schools and 10 million students in pre-graduate degree courses across India. While nearly 3 percent of them find jobs in other fields, the rest opt for employment in the IT industry.
If the flow from high schools to graduate courses increases even marginally, there will be a massive increase in the number of skilled workers available to the industry. Even at current rates, there will be an estimated 17 million people available to the IT industry by 2008, according to Nasscom's projections.
But even with the surge in manpower supply, India is likely to face a shortage of IT managers with the required broad range of skills, going by the results of ZDNet Asia's IT Salary Survey. For example, just 11.5 percent of survey respondents have experience in infrastructure management, while more than 60 percent are better versed in application development.
In line with regional salary trends, the survey found that those with IT management skills command a higher salary in India. The average annual salary of those with more than 10 years experience was 140 percent higher than those with five to 10 years experience. This suggests that IT managers' salaries tend to grow substantially as they accumulate relevant experience over the long term, as well as a possible shortage of very experienced IT managers, which would then lead to higher salaries.
One interesting observation, however, is that the IT management job function does not command the highest average annual salaries among respondents with 10 years or less experience.
IT pays
The best-paid jobs in India seem to be in the IT, Web and Telecom sectors. The average annual salary of respondents is Rs 687,401 (US$15,259) compared with Rs 405,587 (US$9,003) in government, education and health.
Indian IT workers in media, marketing and sales earned the lowest across all IT job functions, except IT Management, which command the second highest average annual salary of Rs 1,342,857 (US$30,757).
Rohit Chattree, director for information technology at human resource company Adecco, told ZDNet Asia that the manpower shortage has pushed up India's IT wages in general, and this has started to erode the country's competitive advantage.
"This has made organizations sit back and think about India's cost advantages that India had about three to four years back," he said.
To maintain India's competitive edge, IT workers have started to move up the value chain, according to Chattree. "For organizations to continue to benefit from India's cost advantage, IT workers have to do work that involves higher-end skills and resources," he explained.
Key findings of ZDNet Asia's IT Salary Benchmark 2006 Survey
To gain insights into Asia's IT workforce and salary trends, ZDNet Asia conducted a survey on the Internet between Aug. 25 and Nov. 6, 2006. The survey drew 5,090 respondents from industry sectors such as government, healthcare, IT, services, telecommunications, legal and finance, across seven Asian countries: Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
Spotlight: India
The survey drew 1,389 respondents across several IT positions, which are broadly categorized into IT management, project development and systems development.
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Average annual IT salary in India
Top 5 Certifications
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Not sure if the avg salaries listed here hold any relevance in todays environment. Salaries in IT sector have hit the roof. Top 5 comps which are considered to be bad paymasters - are also doling out tons to retain middle level emps
Salaries are around 1.5Lakh/annum * no of years of Exp.
regards
Nikhil
Posted by Nikhil on Monday, June 04 2007 06:09 PM