Cognizant Fires 200 Senior Non-Tech Savvy Employees; Even Directors Not Spared

Congnizant wants to hire and recruit employees who are tech savvy.

By Mohul Ghosh On Oct 10, 2018

Cognizant fires non-tech savvy employees

200 Senior Employees Fired From Cognizant

As per reports coming in, 200 senior employees, most of whom are Directors and positions above Directors, have been asked to resign.

Cognizant will spend $35 million as severance packages for these employees.

World Economic Forum has already informed that AI, Robotics etc will kill more than 50 lakh jobs by 2020.

What Is The Reason For Firing?

If we believe the reports, then Cognizant deemed these senior employees unfit for the latest technological skills, hence asked them to resign.

Now, these senior employees were working as Directors and other senior management profiles, and now, their future looks dark.

After firing these senior employees, Cognizant will now increase their efforts to hire tech-savvy employees, who are experts of AI, Robotics, Big Data, Machine Learning and other related skills.

In the next 3-4 months, these terminated employees will be paid Rs 250 crore ($35 million) as compensation.

Was This A Voluntary Decision?

No.

Last year as well, Cognizant fired several senior employees, who were not able to adapt to the new technology. That was a voluntary decision.

However this time, the terminations were not voluntary in nature, and the fired employees were asked to resign.

Some of the terminated employees spoke with TOI, and said that they were asked to sign legal documents, stating that the terminations were not forced and that they cannot initiate any legal action against the company.

Last year, we had reported that some ex-Cognizant employees were about to take the legal course after they were forcefully terminated.

Rumors were in that around 10,000 Cognizant employees were about to be fired in 2017.

Although tech is still the king when it comes to generating new jobs in India, the demand of new-age skills such as AI, Machine Learning etc has gone up. At the same time, hiring across IT companies in India have gone down, but technologies such as Blockchain, Big Data etc are expected to generate more jobs.

Recently, TCS doubled the salary of freshers who have the ‘new age technical’ skills such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Robotics, Machine Learning and more.

We will keep you updated, as we receive more inputs.