Japan looks to India for IT talent, breaks cultural barrier

India has emerged as a poaching ground for nations globally to overcome shortage of engineers

Japan has renewed its interest in Indian information technology talent. The country, struggling with a shortage of labour for emerging areas, is now looking to India for hiring software engineers on mobile, cloud and machine learning technologies.

The Japanese province - Mie Prefecture, has sought help from the Karnataka government to look for local software talent who can migrate to Japan on one-three year projects, ahead of the country launching its Green Card.

It is looking to hire a few hundred engineers to begin with from Bengaluru, India's technology hub that has over 1 million software engineers and slowly expand the need.

IT services industry experts and people who have worked in Japan as software engineers say this could be well a shift in the mindset. So far, Japan has hardly considered Indian talent beyond low-cost value addition.

"They are an ageing society. They are looking at us for highly skilled software engineers. This will lead to more collaboration between Japan and India," says Priyank Kharge, Karnataka IT Minister said in an interview.

Last month, Japan said it would look at issuing Japanese Green Card for highly skilled professionals that would allow them to get residency in one year as against the earlier five-year norm.

"India is extremely attractive to Japan for IT talent and this has been recognised by both global in-house centres in India and large Japanese companies like Hitachi, Sony. However, there is a very large gap between what India has to offer and the popular perception of the value it brings in the boardrooms of Japanese companies. I think it is good that Japan has recognised Indian talent and wants to recruit highly-skilled Indian talent for the Japanese government," says R Chandrasekhar, President of IT services industry body Nasscom.

India has emerged as a poaching ground for nations across the world to overcome shortage of engineers.

The United States has been the biggest beneficiary to attract talent with its H-1B visa programme launched two decades ago that helped US companies overcome shortage of engineering talent and helped India to build over $108 billion software export industry. The UK and Germany followed through with similar but tighter programmes.

For Japan, Chandrasekhar believes, the trend has been different. "Obvious" cultural and language barriers have prompted Japanese organisation to offshore software services work to China and Vietnam.

With the tightening of H-1B visa norms in India's largest software service export market, the US, the Asian nation, experts say, may turn out to be an alternative market.

This is despite the mere 2 per cent share of Indian software export owned by Japan. Chandrasekhar justifies opportunities can open up since the exposure to Japan is miniscule.

The Japanese prefecture of Mei, which has roughly 27 per cent of the more than 18 lakh population aged above 64, will hire up to 500 techies initially and train them on the language for three-four months.

These people will be recruited for different projects at Japanese government-run organisations on contracts of one-three years, says Kharge.

The leadership of both the countries are committed to further the already flourishing bilateral relationship, points out Paramita Sarkar, advisor to Consulate-General of Japan in Bengaluru.

"The Mie prefecture is trying to make good use of the availability of skilled workforce in Karnataka and at the same time to provide an opportunity to these skilled workers to further enhance their experience by living and working in Japan."

Prabhanjan Deshpande, co-founder of The Higher Pitch, an online marketing firm, believes earning trust is crucial for an Indian software engineer to prosper in Japan as people in the land of rising sun takes longer to trust a person from different culture.

"If the country is now looking at recruiting Indian software talent, it seems the time has come. IT engineers from India must not take a one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, they should make an effort to learn Japanese and get familiar with the culture."

Deshpande worked in Japan as an employee of IT services firm iGate for a couple of years.

It is a good news for the Indian IT services industry and the country that Japan is now opening up as an alternative region for both individual talent and companies, says Kris Lakshmikanth, chairman and managing director of Head Hunters India, a recruitment agency.

"The country always had a strict immigration due to language barriers. But this is a good thing that it will train Indian skilled engineers too."

This could be a right time for Japan to tap Indian talent as "the country's need and India's ability perfectly complementing each other", says Chandrasekhar.