Lots of jobs - Good or Bad News

Employment blues has always inspired Bollywood. Be it the struggling Shashi Kapoor in Deewar or SRK in Raju ban gaya Gentleman, we have seen it all. These heros toiling through the streets of Mumbai, catching running buses, waiting in long queues for an interview, getting rejected in the absence of the famed shifarish ka khat and the frustration spurring out of each rejection! But I wonder why we don't get to see this drama anymore? Has finding a white collared job become so easy that it is no longer perceived as a struggle by our directors or has the job market undergone a drastic change wherein demand chases supply ferociously, making the employee look like a scheming villain with 3-4 job offers in hand and ready to take the next leap.Welcome to the new genre in the employment industry, where the mammoth BPO and KPO industries offer jobs with the most tempting packages. It's not one or two of them, but a swarm of IT/ITES companies that are currently chasing the skilled Indians. In this scenario a Casanova changes his job more frequently than his girl friend! Parents boast of big brands where their children work for an obnoxiously high sum of money. But only we know the shallowness of these big names and the money they Offer letters are handed out like pamphlets to the fresh graduates. Easily victimised by brand names and salaries, these 21-22 somethings fall prey to a world of monotony, where their ideas and creativity gets brutally stabbed by the robot-like automated way in which these high profile organizations perform.You have people who do the blind cut copy paste work that makes their once sharp mind absolutely blunt. However these people are much better off compared to those poor souls who are victims of overstaffing. I have been on the 'On the Bench' for a period of 6 months. What do these bright brains do, drink coffee, do a great deal of orkutting, forward forwarded emails, listen to music, talk to their heart's full over the phone and allow their brains to get rusted. Where they procrastinate the single unimportant project they have so that every morning when they come to office, they atleast have some work in hand. Then of course you have those prolonged coffee, lunch and snack breaks where you flirt with dames, plan your weekend picnics or movies. Sometimes you wonder why did they employ me and spend so much on my training, if their plan was to make me sit on my desk from 9.00-6.00? Is that the philanthropy of my organization!Well for these IT industries we are not people but 'Headcount'. You are not a Personality but a Resource. The time you have in hand is not Precious Time but Cheap Capacity. They earn billions of dollars through outsourcing contracts and paying a few thousands to their fresh employees does not cost them much. Moreover its so very fashionable for these IT companies to say we are planning to increase our headcount to XYZ this quarter or we shall have a brand new state of art training institute to accommodate our new recruits or else our profit per employee was XYZ. All this news smells growth that can send their scripts soaring northwards on speculation. I am not saying that they do such blind recruiting just for that reason, but such mass recruitment can definitely attract clients who automatically bestow more trust on an organization which has employed the best people in the industry! Does this seem dangerously familiar to you. Believe it or not this exodus represents the increase in the level of employment about which all Indians are very proud.Outsourcing simply means break down all the processes in an industry and create a pool of low complexity work, one of the mid-level complexity and one of high complexity work Ship out the low complexity work to a BPO, the mid-level complexity work to a KPO and retain the high end job yourself. Which means in an outsourcing process, the outsourcor moves up the value chain and the outsourcee becomes the dumping ground. So far I am ok with all of this. But what really annoys me is the absolute mismatch between the outsourced work and the qualification of the person who is made to do the work.Financial KPOs employ CAs and MBAs to do jobs which even a bright B.Com can do reasonably well. Do these MNCs sourcing out work here know what it takes to clear a CA exam or get admitted into a good B-School? While the starters in India rotting in a BPO (alias KPO) know all technicalities of the financial sector, those who are first year analysts in the London and US Investment Banks come from fields as diverse as literature, history or psychology. While we know what an Investment Bank does even before we take our jobs, most of our counterparts abroad come to know about the functionalities of an Investment Bank only when these banks come to recruit them at their campus. And the saddest part of the story is these analyst send work to the over qualified Indians sitting in the BPO/KPOs dungeons. But once they get a place in the front end offices, they have tremendous opportunities that transforms them into the hard core Investment Bankers, while the Indians who started at a much higher footing, qualification wise, due to lack of the right exposure in a KPO, get stagnated and ultimately land up all frustrated.According to me there is no difference between a BPO and a KPO. It is an absolute myth if you say that KPO offers you more challenging work than a BPO. That's because these MNCs for the sake of maintaining quality always employ over qualified people. So while a B.A. or B.Com. finds the work of reconciliation a child's play, a C.A or an MBA finds the work of preparing a comparable company analysis relatively easier.I need not talk about the stress of working in shifts in some BPOs due to the timing difference. A lot has already been said about this. Sometimes you just feel like saying hey why should I sacrifice my night's sleep to serve those North Americans who create so much of an issue to even grant us a simple visa!With situations like this prevailing please don't blame our generation for job hopping. Either make our syllabus and exams easier, so that we don't look over qualified for jobs that we get as freshers or else if you do not have such plans, try alleviating the work quality for the freshers. Astronomical salary figures and a T-shirt or mug with the company's prominent brand cannot allure us long. Frustration will creep in sooner or later and I hope you don't want to see the vibrant youth of India (which is being envied by all developed countries) being reduced to cut, copy and paste robots.