The heydays of tech industry seem to now be gone, at least in the narrower view, since the industry which was previously thriving, now is in a slump and the same is reflected in the number of jobs that it is poised to create: mere 60000 new ones.
IT Sector’s Lacklustre
This is appalling especially in the case of 2.7 lakh jobs that the industry created in the previous fiscal. What makes the matter particularly precarious is that the industry is subdued by the demand pressures which are triggered by a macroeconomic slowdown in the key markets of the United States and Europe.
It is the North America and Europe markets which generate over 60-80 % revenue of the $250-billion services industry.
Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh threw some light on the over hiring and the impending corrections that “Because there was a lot of over-hiring done during the COVID year, we are seeing some level of correction happening, which is expected and needed for the industry”.
Speaking on the shift of hiring trend to the new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud, cybersecurity, etc., she added that “So the frontier technologies are where we are seeing the demand growing right.”
India’s Upskilling Efforts and the Future of Work
The Indian non-governmental trade association said that industry has committed 60-100 hours per year per employee on upskilling. Giving an update over employees being trained on these nascent technology, he said that the upskilling activities have increased by 9 times as compared to the previous year and over 6.5 lakh employees are getting training on the same.
Pointing out that the gap between the pace of upskilling and the actual pace of technology change, she said that “And that’s going to be the biggest challenge that industry will face, for as to how do you bridge this gap”.
However, she also pointed out that India shall be least impacted amongst other few countries when compared to the global counterparts.
Ghosh, Nasscom’s first women leader, said that “AI will absolutely bring some displacement in jobs, but there will also be a lot of new jobs getting created”.
She added that the obsession should be on skilling people faster for these jobs rather than over job losses.
