Cognizant Firing 350 Employees Who Are Earning More Than Rs 80 Lakh/Yr: Will This Impact India?

IT behemoth Cognizant has now unleashed a new round of layoffs, which will impact mid-level and senior employees.

Will this impact India?

Cognizant Layoffs For Senior Employees

As per news coming in, Cognizant will fire 350 senior and mid-level employees, who are earning between Rs 80 lakh to Rs 1.2 crore per year.

This is part of their cost-cutting measure, and embracing new-age digital technologies, which means traditional way of delivering projects and quality control will end.

It is not clear whether automation is a reason for this firing.

These 350 odd employees, who are getting fired, are aged between 50-55, and the list has been shared with chief executive officer Brian Humphries’ office.

The Master Plan For Saving Money By Cognizant

It is clear that the layoffs are happening to cut costs.

Confirming this fresh layoff, Peter Bendor-Samuel, the chief executive at IT advisory and research firm Everest Group said, “This is a move to cut costs and improve margins. We can expect other moves to cut costs and this is likely to follow a model of further reorganisation with some additional headcount reduction,”

We had earlier reported that Cognizant will fire upto 7000  mid-level employees to save costs, and it is expected that this current termination of 350 employees is part of the plan.

Earlier, Cognizant had promised that they will reskill 5000 of the terminated employees, and then enable them to get new jobs, or re-hire them based on their skills.

Cognizant CFO Karen McLoughlin had said, “We expect the remaining 5,000-7,000 associates to exit the company by mid-2020 either through attrition or role elimination,”

Although 7000 employees are just 2% of the overall workforce employed by Cognizant, it is expected that between 10,000 to 12,000 employees can get terminated, overall.

Will India Get Impacted?

As per information available with us, all these 350 employees who are getting fired, are located out of India.

However, it is not yet clear whether any Indian employee will get impacted or not.

Since more than 150,000 Indians are employed by Cognizant across 10 locations, some of these employees getting fired can be Indian. 

Cognizant hasn’t shared the geographical location of these terminated employees.

We will keep you updated, as more details come in.