Wednesday, July 25, 2007




ROOM FOR MORE
Realty sector needs skilled hands
S. C. Dhall

Owing to a shortage of skilled manpower in construction companies, acquiring qualified workforce is becoming a key factor for realty firms.

Project engineers with sufficient experience are in very short supply in the construction sector. The manpower crunch is also hitting the engineering design consultant space.

Domestic construction companies have started acquiring firms that have specific execution capability in terms of people from Malaysia, Dubai, Egypt, Ireland, Israel and even vice-versa in a number of cases, as per requirements.

Even Malaysian firms are providing training to a number of Indians from construction companies.

On the other hand, a number of big developers have started visiting the Indian Institutes of Management at Ahmedabad and Lucknow to recruit management trainees.

The trainees will handle the company’s ongoing real estate infrastructre and Special Economic Zone projects in and around the country and some of the developers are sending them for training programmes aboard with their counterparts to acquire better knowledge and skills at all levels of the construction sector.

Construction companies are not only acquiring people from the IIMs but also from the engineering and legal fields.

Keeping in mind the shortage in the construction and infrastructure sector, the Indian Institute of Hardware Technology (IIHT) in association with Sikkim Manipal University has launched a course in the infrastructure Management Services — and this is first of its kind in the country, both at the graduate and postgraduate levels.

The graduate course will cover six semesters — a three-year course. The course is being designed by the IIHT.

As per reports, there will be over 1 million jobs in the infrastructure sector.

At the initial stage the institute will set up 50 exclusive centres called the IIHT Varsity all over India to offer these courses. Each centre will have a placement cell to provide job opportunities in areas like desktop support services management, server and backup management, network management, database work management administration and security services.