The IT 'outsourcing' boom in India is now turning into 'off-shoring' boom. The earlier one was more of doing the 'non-core' software development for any of companies from the western world (mainly from the US and Europe) just because of low cost engineering talent in India. The later one is more of doing 'core' product development from India and it requires real 'Quality' engineers. Apart from that more and more companies are flocking into promoting career stream completely based on technical growth, where an individual can grow till the level of Vice President by taking the technical path.

The Embedded systems business is poised for a very high growth in the future in India. According to the market research organization Frost and Sullivan, Out of the $3.25 billion embedded design market in India in 2005, embedded software contributed to 78 percent at $2.53 billion; VLSI, 18 percent at $0.58 billion; and hardware/board design, 4 percent at $0.14 billion. The research company projects that the design market in India will grow to 43 billion in 2015 with embedded software contributing to 84 percent at $36.34 billion; VLSI, 12 percent at $5.09 billion; hardware/board design, 4 percent at $1.64 billion.

Very simple! There would be more and more of next generation product development from India. As the Indian IT industry is making a big leap from 'services' to 'product' paradigm,it is bound to provide huge amount of job opportunities and exciting career opportunities in India. As the Embedded software development is the 'heart' of product development, the future looks even better for high quality embedded engineers. But in reality there is really a skill shortage in India where companies are not able to recruit engineers at the phase they want. Because of this demand-supply problem, embedded systems domain is one of the highly paid and hot areas in India today.

There is a huge shortage of 'quality' manpower in India. There are 6.5 (0.65 million) lakhs of engineering graduates and almost 1 crore (10 million) science graduates in the country and very few of them are 'employable' by the industry. The 6.5 lakhs translates into a suitability pool of about 2 lakhs and then the 1 crore comes down to about 18 lakhs suitable people for the industry. Apart from the above mentioned example, there is loads of media coverage on this latest 'talent-crunch' buzzword, but what is being 'done' to address this problem? At one end bunch of fresh engineers are waiting in the queue to get jobs and at another end companies are feeling 'pinch' because of the talent crunch. There are multiple instances where companies are not able to hire quality engineers at the correct time and that resulted in losing the project itself. Even though Indian IT companies are spending as much as 2000 US dollars (roughly about one lakh) per fresh engineer to train them, it is proving out to be a costly affair for them. This is really a 'reactive' approach and there is definitely a huge gap existing between the Academia and Industry.