Industry News – Aviation
The Aviation Industry - snapshots of the current scenario
- The second largest aviation industry of the world, the Indian fleet has close to 370 aircraft today and more are being added.
- 25% will be the average annual growth in the airline industry in the next 2 years.
- India’s civil aviation passenger growth, at 20 per cent, is among the highest in the world.
- The number of passengers who will be airborne by 2020 is a whopping 400 million. India’s civil aviation ministry expects 80 million passengers by 2020.
Exponential Growth
The civil aviation sector is growing at the rate of 35-40% in the country.
- “Tthe aviation industry will attract investment of $120-150 billion over the next 10 years and have more than 1,000 aircraft in the next 5 years.
- Nearly three million jobs will be created in the next 10 years.
- Air traffic is projected to grow from 60 million per annum at present to 100 million in 2010 and 280 million in 2020.
The Hardware Expansion
- With a seven percent increase in the number of flights into and out of India (an additional 835 flights and more than 200,00 seats a month), the number of flights has virtually doubled from 6,800 in May 2001 to 13,200 in May 2007.
- Domestic airlines are increasing their fleet size aggressively:
New airlines started in last three years and planes: Kingfisher - 32; Spicejet - 17; Indigo - 14; GoAir - 6; Paramount - 5; MDLR - 2; AI Express - 12
Total number of planes in domestic market: about 240
New planes ordered by airlines: 400-450
- According to civil aviation ministry estimates, about "480 aircraft will join the country’s existing fleet size of 310 by 2012.”
- India with 250 aircraft has the prospect to buy 500 civilian aircraft by 2020. This could reach to 1,000 when the current fleet is replaced.
- 800 new aircrafts are expected to join the industry in the next 5 to 10 years.
Job Opportunities for you!
40, 000 cabin crew will be required in the next 3 to 4 years. Indian civil aviation industry will create 40 lakh jobs in the next 10 years.
- ith the collective industry fleet strength expected to reach 900 from the present 350 by 2009, the Indian aviation industry would require 7,500 to 8,000 cabin crew (which includes air hostesses) per year. India's domestic airlines would need 650 new aircraft by 2012, up from the current 210 creating a huge demand for air hostesses.
- Air India and Indian airlines may have to hire 2,000 cabin crew for airline’s fleet. Kingfisher has recently decided to buy 50 more aircrafts. The carrier should hire nearly 1,500 cabin crew in the next five years. Jet is expected to hire nearly 2,200 cabin crewover a five-year period. GoAir, Paramount, Air Deccan and Spice Jet are also expected to hire a considerable number of skilled manpower in the coming years.
- According to estimates by World Travel & Tourism Council, India will have at least 1.5 million openings in aviation and related industries by 2010, but is facing an increasing shortage of trained personnel.
Industry News – Hospitality
In the
services and the aviation industry, there is a yawning supply and demand gap in the hospitality sector, as well. And, this situation is going to get worse, not better, with international brands setting up their bases in India.
There are about 34 institutions affiliated to the National Council of Hotel Management and Catering Technology, an agency working under the Department of Tourism, Government of India. Out of these, 24 are Institutes of Hotel Management (IHMs) and the rest (ten) are Food Craft Institutes (FCI). While the first category of institutes has a combined pool of 3000 seats in their three-year degree programmes, there are another 1500 seats in FCIs for one-year certificate programmes.
Besides these there are another 150 private sector institutes giving hotel management training. The total trained manpower supply at about 12000 every year --- which is still far short of the demand for several lakhs of trained students for the hospitality sector.
About 30 per cent of these students do not remain in the industry, i.e. they take up jobs in allied industries, such as call centres, cruise ships, airlines, banks, entertainment centres and other catering establishments. Some go abroad, while others stay at home to pursue higher studies. Thus eventually only 50 per cent of the trained students are available to the hotel and restaurant industry every year.
Now the demand
Department of Tourism in their new hotel classification guidelines have prescribed that following numbers of trained manpower must be employed in different star category hotels.
 |
1 Star : 10 per cent |
|
2 Star : 15 per cent |
|
3 Star : 20 per cent |
|
4 Star : 25 per cent |
|
5 Star / 5 Star Deluxe : 30 per cent |
Again according to the statistics released by the Department of Tourism for 2003 there were 1720 hotels and 92000 hotel rooms in star category that were awaiting classification. Thus, the total number of trained manpower required for approved hotels runs into a few lakhs and that’s only for DOT-approved hotels!
To be sure there are graduates - in fact plenty of them - but just a small fraction of these students are industry-ready! So recruiters don’t want to touch them even with a barge poll. Inducting and training them to international standards calls for a lot of hard work and expenditure, which institutes like AHA happily handle for them.
And, this kind of training intervention is urgently required because according to the Indian Hotel Industry Survey 2002 – 03, compiled by FHRAI through HVS International, only a small percentage of them are formally trained. And, if this is the condition of staff in five and four star, imagine the quality of staff at ordinary hotels and restaurants! They must simply be starving of talented staffers!
There are so many restaurant chains in the country (and new opens are opening every day) like McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Nirulas etc. that also regularly need trained manpower. The FHRAI report estimates that this requirement would also be running in several lakhs!
Quality of Staff In the Hospitality Sector
The FHRAI report states that the present quality of education in hotel management institutes is poor. There may be about ten IHMs in the public sector and 20 in the private sector who may pass out students who may be acceptable for supervisory positions in the hotel and restaurant industry, otherwise the rest are very poorly trained, needing fresh training from their employers, the report maintains.
This is supported by the fact that both Taj Group and the Oberoi Group (through OCLD), are inducting 30 to 40 per cent of their candidates in the Management Trainee (MT) cadre and then spending a good sum on giving them comprehensive training before absorbing them in their normal cadre. Just imagine, if there were more quality institutes like AHA, Taj and Oberoi wouldn’t have to open their own schools!
AHA is here to plug this huge training vacuum.
Industry News – Others
ITES-BPO
India’s Services Industry: Separating Fact From Fiction
In line with the global trend, the services sector in India is growing exponentially. In 2000-01 the share of services in the country's GDP was 54.2 per cent, up from the 51.5 per cent recorded in 1998-99. And, all indications are that this growth will get accelerated not only because of burgeoning of services within India, but also because of their increasing export.
According to the World Development Indicators, 2003, recently released by the World Bank, India's services sector clocked an average 7.9 per cent growth per annum between 1990 and 2001, against 6.9 per cent between 1980 and 1990, beating the global rate of 3.1 per cent. Thus India's services sector has emerged among the top-five fastest growing in the world during 1990-2001, surpassing its track record in the 1980s.
The IT Enabled Service (ITES) sector, the fastest growing segment of the service industry, recorded 70 per cent growth in 2001-02, while the global market is projected to over US$ 142 billion by the year 2008.
In 1997-98, services accounted for nearly 48.6 per cent of India’s GDP, far more than the contributions of the agricultural or the manufacturing sectors (RBI Annual Report, August 1998).
Not surprisingly, Mckinsey & Co. predict a $ 17 billion services industry by 2008, which can result into a combined saving of $ 17 billion for organisations that move their back-office processing to India.
Nonetheless, this represents just a small section of the global services industry.
An Acute Shortfall of Trained Manpower
If the NASSCOM prediction of 1.1 million jobs by 2008 is anything to go by, India needs to ramp-up fast in order to meet the demands of this booming industry.
This represents a major Human Resource challenge for us. Although the Indian universities produce over two million English-speaking graduates every year, which is 40 per cent more than the United States, only about 30 per cent of this work force is job-ready, according to the industry estimate.
A Gartner Fact Book on the Indian BPO industry indicates that the top factor that makes India an attractive destination for BPO operations is our huge base of easily trainable, neutral-accent, English-speaking human resource. English is taught as the first language in most urban schools and is widely accepted as the primary language for business communication. This is critical to most BPO services. Yet, the irony is that out of every 100 graduates that apply to call centres, just two or three get selected --- the rest are summarily rejected. This is because although we have a potential workforce of over a million, only a small proportion of this workforce is job ready. The rest do not exactly fit the bill as required by the BPO industry This section of our students are either poor communicators, or poorly groomed, or don’t possess good customer interaction skills to be engaged in this industry.
As a result, service providers often have to arrange for in-house training to meet the manpower demand shortfall, which, given the high attrition rate (35%) eventually turns out to be a cost-ineffective proposition for the BPO vendors. Typically, companies spend 10-12 per cent on the training of a fresh graduate. The cost of accent training alone ranges between Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for a two-to-five-month session. For a 300-seater call centre facing the normal 30 percent attrition, this translates into a whopping expenditure of Rs 60 lakh per annum, which can be a serious dampener for this industry.
How Can We Power This Performance?
We need to quickly scale up our existing youth resource. We need to catch them young. We have to move from complacency to competency building and we have to acknowledge that the best platform for imbibing service skills in our youth, which can quickly be deployed to any industry, business or profession later, are the schools. Our estimate is that at least 30 per cent of our school graduating population can be adequately trained in soft-skills to support the demands of the ITES industry.
All that is required is to put them in high gear. We have to empower them with the right skill sets --- voice and accent neutralization, telesales and telemarketing skills, sensitisation to other cultures, flawless knowledge of the English language, possessing a general positive attitude, good inter personal skills etc.
It may be a giant leap of faith but it can power our economy by transforming our youth’s existing skill-sets.
|
