Cisco's plan to produce 360,000 network engineers

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 10 February 2008 10:26

IT Industry - Strategy

Cisco has announced a series of initiatives in India that it hopes will produce 360,000 trained network engineers in five years. This would, according to Cisco, increase the pool of network engineers six-fold. The sheer scale of the initiative highlights the very rapid growth in the Indian IT economy and the critical shortage of skilled people, which threatens to impact Cisco's business: if its customers can't get skilled people, projects get put on hold and Cisco gear does not get bought.

The number might just be enough to meet India's demand. According to a recent IDC report on global skills, cited by Cisco, India's surging economic development will create a demand for 137,000 more networking professionals by 2009.

Australia too has a shortage of skilled network engineers, as Cisco highlighted last year, and a massive increase of skilled people in India could further fuel the outsourcing of those jobs that can be outsourced, or lead to employers importing skilled workers, either as permanent residents or on contract.

Both outsourcing and the use of contract staff would further exacerbate the skills shortage: those with the higher level skills gained from on-the-job experience would not be within the Australian labour pool.

In late 2007 Cisco Australia briefed journalists to try and raise awareness of what the company sees as a major global issue, and provide some details of its own contribution to addressing the shortage. Kevin Bloch, Cisco's director advanced technologies and engineering, pointed out that, video and its demands aside, the number of networked devices on the planet is growing exponentially: there are some 300 million PCs, some three billion cellphones and upwards of a trillion RFID devices and sensors, and this generates huge demand for network engineering skills.