The landscape of the $150-billion IT sector, one of India’s largest job-providers, is changing fast, owing to technological advances in automation and robotics. This sector employs 42.5 lakh Indians directly, and has created over twice as many jobs indirectly in other fields. But it is gradually moving away from the linear growth model, with rise in revenue matching net employee addition, to a non-linear one where income growth is independent of additional hiring. Automation would then replace entry-level jobs, denying jobs to college-leavers, and lead to the retrenchment of mid-level professionals who couldn’t remain relevant via constant reskilling.
Most top IT firms have already cut campus hiring. While this may be good for companies as they can earn more profits with fewer employees, it is bad for job-seekers. It is bound to cause ripples in the Indian job market, where a huge chunk of engineers aspire to be IT professionals. A majority of nearly 16 lakh engineering graduates who seek jobs every year may find it difficult to get one. This could turn India’s demographics, that is deemed an asset, into a liability.
As the IT job market undergoes a tectonic shift, studies suggest people must reskill themselves to suit job demands. People must move away from mundane work like coding, back office maintenance and applications testing to high-skilled work in innovation, research and designing. For this, however, a long-term strategy is required. Government, industry and academics should coordinate more to make our youth future-ready, without which India’s goal to emerge as a global power could prove to be elusive.
