India is facing talent shortage: Wharton Professor Dr Peter Cappelli

This is what Dr Peter Cappelli, George W. Taylor Professor of Management at Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania observed while addressing Skills World 2008 seminar, organized by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Aspire on May 16, 2008. There is a huge problem of skilled manpower in India. Indian corporate sector is not able to find adequate employable workforce to meet their requirements, said Dr Cappelli.

There is a lot of competitiveness among the firms. The problem that they are facing is that from where do they get talented and trained manpower. This is actually the problem of getting right human resources at a competitive level, said Dr Cappelli.
While comparing the Indian context with US, said Dr Cappelli, In US, employers are happy to make investment in the development of their employee while Indian employers are not much willing to make investment in the training of their employees.

Sharing the tools to make people more employable, Dr Cappelli emphasized that industry should develop talent internally and said, Reducing upfront costs, improve employee retention, staffing development with employees and increase employee value through work based training and experiences are some of the tools that industry can use to make people more productive.

Dr Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania and Director, Center for Human Resources. Dr Cappelli is also the author of the recently released book, Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in the Age of uncertainty.

The book uses principles of Supply-chain management in managing talent within an organization. Says Dr Cappelli in Talent on Demand, I spent several years reading the best-practice literature in talent management and found I was learning nothing about how to solve this fundamental question of how to match the supply and demand for talent. The insights I found came instead from a seemingly unrelated area: the field of operations research and supply chain management. These fields have made great strides in recent years. Few businesses simply produce as much as they can and then leave it to the market to sort out the price. Rather, they try to anticipate how much of which product or service they should produce at a given price to meet the estimated demand from customers. The talent management challenge is very similar. It involves the same steps: forecasting product demand is the equivalent of forecasting talent needs, estimating the cheapest and fastest ways.