Last year was a nightmare for the Indian IT workforce. Almost every top Indian IT company had its share of layoffs. This is likely to continue for years to come.
In 2017, Wipro and Infosys along with other five top Indian IT companies laid off more than 56,000 of their employees, sending a chill down the spines of almost every employed engineer. The reasons for layoffs were attributed to adoption of automation by these companies, demand for skilled people in emerging technologies which are replacing older technologies, and incapability of people to be re-skilled in emerging technologies.
In 2016, Infosys alone had laid off almost 9000 employees and its spree of layoffs continued till 2017, while Cognizant had to let go its 6000 employees. In fact, a few companies had to take desperate measures, and had their employees forcibly put down their papers which even landed them in legal troubles.
Fact of the matter is during the last couple of years a very large faction of IT employees lost their job.
Lack of skilled workforce in emerging technologies
The layoffs have majorly affected professionals with five to six years of experience, while a few companies have reached up to senior managers, VPs, and other professionals in senior management roles. Meanwhile, hiring among these companies has also been down. The technologies for which these companies train are now replaced with new technologies which have made employees with expertise in older technologies redundant. The new technologies are more efficient and seek a different skill set with little to zero connection with older technologies. The lack of skilled workforce in these new technologies has slowed down the hiring among companies as well as forced companies to re-equip their employees with the knowledge of new technologies.
A report in Economic Times states “the sector witnessed a decline in hiring as Indian IT services companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and others shifted focus from“scale to skill”.
Save yourself from imminent layoff by re- skilling yourself in emerging technologies.
Companies are taking initiatives to upskill their employees, but fear of employees leaving after gaining the skills and joining some other company, holds these companies back from taking further steps in this direction.
Re-skill to avoid getting redundant
In a recent survey conducted by NHRD, which included 200 CHROs ( Chief Human Resource Officers) noted that Indians need to upskill multiple times in their career to fill the talent gap, as skills will be the key driver to determine pay scales of working professionals in the coming days.
Start learning emerging technologies and save yourself against imminent layoff
Over the last few years, there has been creation of new job roles that didn’t exist before. These new jobs were created because of the application of cloud technologies to enterprise operations and making them operationally efficient. Lately, the amount of data available with enterprises and the potential it harbours to solve challenging business problems has created new jobs.
Big data, data science and machine learning are few of these jobs. These jobs require fundamentally different skill set from the jobs that had existed before, and requires people to learn skills from ground up.
The following are some of the prominent job roles and the respective skills that they require.
- Data Scientist: This job role requires knowledge of R, Python, and SAS
programming, Inferential statistics, and data visualisation tools like Tableau. The major task of Data Scientists is to solve operational and business challenges using the huge amount of data available with companies.
The average salary of Data Scientists in India is approx. ₹6 LPA. Major companies that hire Data Scientist with the best-in-market salary are HSBC, Fractal Analytics, and McKinsey & Co, BCG, amongst others. - Blockchain Developer: Lately, cryptocurrency has gained grounds in India, and this consequently given rise to a number of startups working in cryptocurrency space. Hence, there’s huge demand for Blockchain Developers. Blockchain development requires a Developer to have strong programming skills and familiarity with crypto platforms such as Ethereum, HashGraph, Hyper Ledger etc.
- Machine Learning Expert: This job role requires knowledge of probability (and techniques like Markov Decision Processes, Bayesian Network, Statistics, data modelling and more.
The average salary of a Machine Learning Expert in India is ₹ 7–9 LPA. - Full-stack Developer: Full-stack developers are expected to be familiar with functional coding and some frequently used web dev. technologies such as Node.js, Redis, Angular/ React framework, AWS etc. These technologies are major web development technology which have been increasingly in demand among companies.
The average salary of a Full-stack Developer in Developer is India is ₹ 6 LPA.
Professionals with some form of experience in managing and manipulating database are moving to these jobs as the scope for database administration diminishes. Similarly, full-stack development, UI/UX Developer, etc are some of the new jobs that companies are looking to hire for. The skills for these jobs require knowledge of advance web technologies that didn’t exist a few years ago which has now left working professionals with no option, but to learn these new technologies and progress in their career, or risk their career and get replaced by the younger generation with the knowledge of new technologies.
edWisor is a re-skilling/up-skilling platform where you can learn new technologies and skill yourself for new job roles in the IT industry. You can learn skills at your own pace and work on projects, so for working professionals it offers complete flexibility with respect to learning time. edWisor also offers to help working IT professionals looking to switch to better paying job roles and get them hired.
