The Indian IT industry does not seem to have made enough efforts to up-skill its human resources dynamically, leading to such speculation. As for the layoffs that have been announced and confirmed by the companies, the government’s statements have assured that these are only part of annual appraisals and nothing more.
While it may seem that those who have good working experience in the industry might be on the “safe side of the shore”, experts say otherwise. The ones with less work experience but high skills are the ones who will be able to sail through “if and when the storm hits”, they say.
An apt example of this can be seen in the results of an on-going coding competition “TechGig Code gladiators” where 69% of the top scorers in the early rounds had less than two years’ of experience as 72% of the total participants were working professionals.
The key takeaway from the coding arena’s data on its top scorers is that the skills of the winners matter more than the number of years they have been working in the industry. People with high work experience of 11 years or more constituted only 5% of the top scorers, while the ones with hardly any work experience formed the majority (69%) of the top scorers. Participants with 3-6 years of work experience comprised 18% of the top scorers and those with 7-10 years of experience comprised 8% of the top scorers.
Commenting on the “unrest” that IT professionals are facing right now, Gautam Sinha, CEO, Times Internet, said, “Broad statements on layoffs in the IT industry are mostly speculative. However, I think Artificial Intelligence/automation will accelerate some Indian IT companies’ transition from body shops into IP creating institutions, thus moving up the value chain. What is clear from the current trends is that people at the bottom of the value chain will have to up-skill and adapt to stay relevant.”
Experts said that the lack of dynamic up-skilling over the years might render the ones with no new skill sets in rough waters even if they have been working for a long time in the industry.
While the layoff statements might be speculative in nature, the repercussions are palpable. Approximately 100 software professionals signed up as primary members to form India’s first “IT sector union” to safeguard interests of employees in India’s information technology industry in Tamil Nadu. However, most of the employees in the state have not been willing to join the union as they fear their companies might take action.
To understand why mere speculation can create such “unrest”, a look at the number of people employed in the IT sector explains it all. Infosys has over 17,000 employees in Chennai, Wipro has 25,000, and TCS, India’s largest software exporter, has 60,000 employees in 13 centres in Tamil Nadu. Interestingly, Karnataka has not allowed trade unions for IT professionals and software companies.
However, all is not gloomy as there are opportunities for the Indian IT sector to create more jobs through existing avenues. Recognising the rising heat in India’s $155 billion IT and business process management (BPM) industry, ASSOCHAM’s Manju R.S. Negi said, “Our IT and BPM industries can create more jobs on net basis if they seriously get involved in the fast expanding domestic market, riding on the government’s financial inclusion programmes like Jan Dhan Yojana and Aadhaar-based service delivery models.”
According to ASSOCHAM, there is no point in being reactive to what is happening in the main global consuming centres for the IT and BPM sectors which employ about four million young work force in India in over 16,000 small or big companies.
“Close to 60% of the exports are accounted for by banking-finance-insurance. Now, the kind of data base that is being generated by the Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojana and its linkages with Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme, can be a delight for a different set of analytics, which then can be shaped into products for a whole lot of industries like fast moving consumer goods, automobile, telecom, insurance, agri-inputs and agri products, health and so on,” Negi said.