Boeing and Airbus hunt for highly-skilled talent in India

Boeing and Airbus are increasingly looking to India for highly-skilled, low-cost engineers to meet a boom in demand for aircraft and expand their manufacturing presence in the world’s fifth-largest economy. Airbus plans to hire 1,000 people in India this year out of 13,000 globally. Boeing and its suppliers, which already employ about 18,000 workers in the nation, have been growing by some 1,500 staff every year, the US jet manufacturer’s India head Salil Gupte told Bloomberg News in an interview. With about 1.5m engineering students graduating annually, India is a rich source of talent for plane makers facing record orders from airlines as travel surges again after the Covid pandemic. Boeing can hire an engineer in Bengaluru, India’s southern tech hub, for 7% of the cost of a similar role in Seattle, according to salary data compiler Glassdoor. The country has Boeing’s second-biggest workforce worldwide, Gupte said. “Companies come to India for the incredible talent in innovation, not just in technology and software, but also in hard engineering and increasingly in manufacturing,” he said at the Aero India show in Bengaluru last month. Alongside the hiring push, Boeing and Airbus are also establishing some production in India, which is pitching itself as a less politically fraught alternative to China.<br/>