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India’s information technology industry might generate about 300,000 high paying new jobs annually in sectors such as cloud computing, cyber security and Big Data.
Companies, both local and multinational, are looking for people with these skills. A study by online learning platform Simplilearn that surveyed companies and had about 7,000 respondents, says those with newer skills are in demand and IT companies are ready to pay more for these.
“Jobs are opening in new-age sectors such as data science, AI (artificial intelligence), IoT (internet of things), cloud computing and cyber security. What we are seeing from all these companies is that they will continue to be net recruiters. While they are phasing out some types of jobs, they are hiring from the other side,” said Kashyap Dalal, chief business officer of Simplilearn, in a phone interview.
Adding: “Ideally, they are investing in retraining in a big way because they want to deploy these people elsewhere, while at the same time they want to do fresh hiring if that talent pool is not enough or the reskilling is not happening fast enough.”
India’s IT sector employs close to four million people across small and medium organisations, services and back-office entities, as well as multinational companies that have set up captive firms to service their global businesses. Most companies are seeing churn due to shifts in technology. Traditional IT is being replaced with infrastructure on the cloud, office applications being rented on the internet and users expecting that these applications could be accessed on a smartphone, similar to how they access Facebook.
This has forced companies to look for people with newer skills that are fewer in the market. For this, most have undertaken a massive reskilling exercise, to ensure engineers who worked on traditional IT upgrade for the newer requirements.
“At this point, the number of jobs at risk would be a very large pool but this is not going to get wiped out overnight. It is going to be a gradual process; over a period, automation implementation would happen and jobs phased out. That’s how it typically happens,” said Dalal.
The survey finds over half of IT professionals with work experience of four to 10 years are spending money for courses and training programmes that help them in-learn these new skills. Some of the top courses these professionals are learning are in big data & analytics, project management, cloud computing, cyber security, 'Agile & Scrum' and digital marketing.
