Managerial Challenges The global recession that hit the business world and to some extent the private sector saw unprecedented migration of employees across companies predominantly due to the uncertainty in the job security that from factual sacking or laying off by the organizations. Many people looked at the rate of unemployment and loss of jobs and even without proper prompting opted to jump ship. This trend of attrition became so common across the world and one of the most noted cases was in the Indian manufacturing industry. Amazingly, the trend of attrition in India was geared towards the software industry, a trend that left many managers and managements in dilemma of how to arrest it.

It is a commonplace in India to see people with barely any software acquaintance thirsting to be software engineers, people who can hardly spell the word Java are all flooding into the field. This paper purposes to look at the effect that this trend of mass migration to software industry may have on the manufacturing industry like the Tata steel and Tata motors. The paper will further look at the measures that can be taken to salvage the situation before it is too late and the manufacturing industry suffers a great deal.

The paper takes the perspective of the Tata Human Resource personnel who are geared towards taping all the available talent. The paper will also delve into the now common phenomenon of lateral movements in the employment sector that has seen mass migration of mid-level managers in pursuit of further education with a prospect of moving to other fields like knowledge outsourcing and software industry due to the better pays in those areas.

Background

According to India Current Affairs (2011), India churns out an average of 500,000 engineers each year. Of these qualified engineers, 22% are said to take up to 2 years before they land a job yet there is a grand shortage of skills in other countries like China. There has existed and there still exists a job scarcity in India against a background of mass engineering skills, consequently, there have been experienced a mass shift to the software sector by the young engineering graduates so as to make money.

However, there is an irony in the Indian manufacturing sector since there has been a mismatch between the skills and the compensation procedures and levels for the skills. Even though there is a mass expansion of the steel sector, infrastructure and the auto industries in general, there is a mismatch in the skills and the compensation. It is estimated that only 25% of the graduate engineers are qualified enough to work for multinationals and even these are grossly underpaid if and when they get jobs locally. The rest have insufficient technical skills, English inaptitude, inability to orally present an agendum and wanting team skills. This problem can be attributed to the satiation for money among the students and not the zeal to acquire the skills and knowledge (Express India, 2011).

The best, though selective universities, produce very few engineers and the private colleges produce imbalanced engineers who are not all round in their engineering practice. This may mean a lot of challenges in other areas that pertain to the economy of the country. Bearing this in mind and the expected massive expansion of the IT sector to approximately 1.7 million job slots within the coming four years, many organizations are already striving to upgrade their staff, sourcing for new talent as well collaborating with colleges for better qualified engineers upon graduation. This they do by offering remedial tutorials for the member of faculty as well as identifying good engineers to be undergraduates even from the remotest least heard about colleges in India. The manufacturing industry has as well engaged in an upgrading program where they offer in house further training for the fresh engineering graduates for a period of up to six months to make them ready for the job. The shortage is that dire.

The problem still persists and will take some time to be solved since even big IT firms in India like the Tata Consultancy Services still lack the manpower that is required. This is in stark contrast to the recent past where Tata consultancy needed to get in touch with the top engineering institutions and they would get all the manpower needed. The dilemma is that, in the past 10 years, the engineering institutions have more than tripled as postulated by All India Council of Technical Education most being the privately run institutions yet the problem persists.

In the software industry there has been an increase in the remuneration...

Indeed it is estimated by Payscale (2011) that the highest salaries are among the IT employees and there is still demand. This makes the software engineers to demand for higher remuneration which makes it hard for most organizations to retain them. The real labor insufficiency is beginning to sink in and with an estimated shortage of 500,000 professional engineers there is need to get concerned. Indeed, big companies like Google found it hard to source for enough engineers in India with the qualifications that were needed (Startup Dunia, 2011).
This has been coupled with a novel trend of institutions specializing in offering English language lessons for the communication and the technical workplace skills that a graduate may require before he gets into the job industry. These colleges will gap the difference that remains between the engineering skills and the on-job application of the learnt skills.

The private investment in the education sector is still widely allowed in India owing to the fact that an estimated 10% only of ages 18-15 manage to get to the college levels with a majority 40% of above 15 years being illiterate. There is now pressure to allow the private investors to venture into the higher education sector. This makes a lot of sense bearing the fact that majority of the foreign students in USA universities are from India and the numbers are fast swelling in Canada and Australia which is a situation that puts India at a cross roads as noted by Nandan M. Nilekani (2009)-the chief executive of Infosys by then.

It is worth noting that India has one of the most active populations in the world with literally half of its population under 25 years, the government should put more effort and time in educating its population and enhance their chances of being absorbed into well paying jobs that are skilled or else there will a constant backlog of unskilled and unemployable young men and women of India.

Introduction to Indian Automotive Industry

Problem Statement:

The automotive industry faces several problems, but in the scope of this paper, the challenges that the auto industry is combated with, Tata Industry in particular in their daily operations is divided into two:

Imbalance talent and skills; despite the fact that each year there are more than 500,000 graduate engineers churned from the local universities, they are hardly good enough to handle the hands-on challenges of the industry. This is further exacerbated by their reluctance to work in the local industries and this account for up to 70%. 5% are employable according to the Society of Indian Automobiles (SIAM)

Retention of employees; there have been of late a gradual increase in the trend of employees moving away from Tata motors and pursuing higher education there after joining other industries that have better remunerations. This trend has been realized during the last decade and is deemed to continue for the coming several years.

Literature Review

Job Satisfaction

It is true, as Jain et.al (2007) indicates that "The causes of employees' satisfaction are restricted to not only to factory related factors alone but they sum the whole gamut of men's needs and aspirations." These needs and aspirations are encapsulated in each and every employee's daily endeavors to make life better for themselves and their families. Being that the satisfaction is not related to the factory alone, there must be a deliberate effort by the organization to ensure that the satisfaction is extended beyond the life within the organization and the effects extend as far as well.

However, the satisfaction of the employees may not necessarily imply high motivation and performance of the employees since they may be satisfied but lack in morale. This is a paradox that is becoming more and more predominant in many organizations as noted by The Ryder Self Group (2003). Therefore, job satisfaction is just part of it and not and end in itself.

Job satisfaction in the corporate world is related to several other factors that are provided for in the organizational environment like the leadership style and quality, communication channels, interaction among employees, decision making processes setting of goals and targets for employees as well as the control systems put in place.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs states that people are motivated in life to achieve the basic needs first after that is when they can move to the more complex needs. The concept is usually put in form of a pyramid with the…