Building Employees Vs Billing Employees

Well let's face it, the Indian IT industry has started maturing considerably, the SI vendors were content to "bill" employees. It was something like this 0-3 years - engineer ....3 to 5 years - tech lead ....5 years onwards manager...senior manager. The titles were grand as the billing rates increased with fancy sounding titles.

The global recession hit the IT industry in full flow - when most companies evaluated the so-called managers i.e., the ones who had been baked a bit too early. Imagine a bakery which takes 6 hours to bake a particular pastry, the bakery becomes very popular as they sell good items at a cost effective price. As the demand goes higher and higher , more baking machines are installed ...still demand is peaking ...so the management decides to give a slip to the baking process ---let's do only 5 hours for the pastry batches....the result is customers are unhappy ...demand is sluggish , customers are not able to digest the " products"

Imagine this simile in a software scenario, without adequate experience and competence,the person has been elevated to a higher role which creates a lot of stress for the individual. But part of the blame also has to be shifted to employee aspiration (greed?) when they view professionals beyond  five years of work experience ...like lepers if they do not have the manager "tag".

Coming to the point , I saw a person's profile  on linkedin site ....manager in company 1 , senior manager company 2 ( within 9 months)....group manager  ...company 3 ( within 1 year)....software development center head  in company 4 ...total experience in 4 companies about 4 years.

Now there could be a genius whizkid who is totally capable, but everyone in the market cannot be a whizkid.
Indian employers (read SI) have to groom talent which rests squarely on the following:

1.Setting expectations
2. Hiring based on meritocracy
3. No skipping  "baking" processes
4. Evaluating current enablement
5. Empowering employees

Well that's a long list and will take a long time ...Psst could we bill this 1 year experienced person as a PM ( Just for now :)!!!)

Mentality and Paradigm change ...also required
Keep smiling and keep learning.