14 DAY TRIAL // IBM has been reported to open two new offshore outsourcing centers in India. It may seem surprising, but the company is facing serious problems regarding workforce availability, since finding and retaining quality IT staff has become a challenge.
The company announced that it has already opened the gates of a new global delivery center in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Moreover, the "Big Blue" also plans to open another facility until summer. According to IBM spokespersons, the company will create about 3,000 new job opportunities. IBM will have six global delivery centers and more than 70,000 employees in 10 Indian cities.
IBM will especially focus on Technology Universities graduates and IT professionals that are concerned with IT strategy and architecture,business consulting, enterprise software (SAP, Siebel, and Oracle), testing, and business intelligence. They will be directed to the newly opened centers, where they will be certified in using the IBM technology.
"We are pioneering new ways for our people to certify their skill levels as both a validation of their value to clients and to reinforce the quality of our employees' personal skill sets," an IBM spokesman said on Monday. The US company will tackle certification differently than before and will focus on the employees' skills rather than on their qualification.
Recently, IMB was reported to have laid off some entry-level programmers who did not perform well in aptitude tests. Rumors had it that the number of affected employees ranged between 200 and 700 programmers, but the company would not comment upon such unofficial news.
India is becoming more and more attractive for large-sized conglomerates. There are more companies struggling to increase their presence in India, such as Cisco and Intel, for instance, and there is a huge battle on skilled IT professionals to meet the requirements of the offshore outsourcing industry.