Liberalisation of mobile phones, and the prospect of full competition in the industry from January next year, has created tens of thousands of new jobs in Germany many more than have been lost as Deutsche Telecom slims down, according to a report in The Economist.

However, not all of these jobs are glamorous hi-tech ones; they include hundreds hundreds of men digging up streets to lay new cables. Debis, a daughter company of the country's largest industrial conglomerate, Daimler-Benz, has hired an extra 1,300 workers. IBM has taken on even more.BMW has hired a net 3,000 new workers in the past three years and is now looking for a further 400. Contrary to public opinion, which tends to regard foreign investment by German companies as a job-killing act of economic treachery, the car company says that the increase is partly due its new factory in the US.

Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz has created 500 permanent jobs in its main factory at Unterturkheim, thanks to a new agreement on flexible working hours. Although German employers like to complain about the country's high wages and taxes, many admit privately that it is flexibility, rather than cost reductions, which they need most urgently. This is resisted bitterly by the unions, which realise that such local deals will undermine their own role in negotiating industry-wise deals.

The biggest spurt of new jobs has come from last November's limited liberalisation of shop-opening hours.

Academia-industry mix

Stanford University is an integral part of the Silicon culture. Much of what goes on between the academia and industry has to do with people starting out as faculty or students, says the Fortune magazine. They keep in touch. People go back and forth from academia to industry. The university is a huge pool of talent that supplies the Valley with many of its engineers, lawyers, bankers, and venture capitalists, in addition to the odd billionnaire entrepreneur. It's a source of fresh technology as well as a neutral meeting ground where industry types mix with faculty, students, and even competitors. Companies spin out of Stanford regularly: Hewlett Packard, of course, but also Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Cisco Systems, Yahoo.Many faculty members have part-time jobs in industry; many industry people have part-time faculty appointments.

Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Cal Tech, MIT, and every superb university in the country provides people and technology to Silicon Valley. Some would argue, in fact, that MIT is the nation's finest engineering school. None, however, has managed to surround itself with a thriving high-technology region the way Stanford has. What sets Standford apart from other intellectual centres isn't that it contains extremely smart people with big ideas; it's that there are so many people right in one part of the world tailor-made to take their ideas and turn them into something real-and often profitable.Wooing engineers

The Westech Career Expo, a job fair for hardware and software engineers in California, had eager employers hoping to fill up thousands of vacant positions, says a report in the Fortune magazine. The scene was something like this.

Quantum Corp here, Cisco Systems there and Apple Computer just around somewhere. The biggies were all there to woo engineers. You just had to take a pick.

To entice applicants to appear in person, employers send hiring managers to Westech. Hewlett-Packard alone brought some 80 managers, who fielded 4,000 resumes in the course of two days. And the quick personal encounters greatly speed up the interview mechanism.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.