Over the last couple of years, industries are moving towards technology driven solutions. With ease of artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented/virtual reality and big data & analytics; companies look ahead for such efficient ways to be deployed. There is an increasing newer skill demand, with increasing automation threatening India’s workforce.
For technical service providers, new skill sets are required. The IT sector needs to adapt new technology to survive in this changing environment and there are number of factors introducing a transition with more dependency on process and technology rather than people dependent. Cognizant, one of the second largest IT employers in India witnesses decline in the country, whereas it is expanding in the US and UK.
Cognizant India in 2017, saw a decline of workforce by almost 8,000 to 180,000. On contrary, they added 2,900 more people in the US to 50,400 and 2,300 in Europe to close at 13,800. However, the company’s overall count remained at 260,000 as compared to 260,200 in 2016, a marginal increase of just around 200.
Recently, employee count at most of the Indian IT services companies has shrunk. For example, Infosys, in December 2017 quarter added 3200 headcounts, whereas there was a dip by 113 over the previous quarter. In Wipro, number of employees stood at 162,553, a drop of 1206 over the previous quarter.
The largest Indian player in IT services space, Tata Consultancy Service added just few more headcounts in December quarter. HCL technologies added 250 employees in December quarter. In this age of progression, companies are marching towards non-linearity delinking the revenue growth with headcount.
Now, the skills set demand has seen a different scale to suit new age skills, it’s much easier to find those in some of the matured tech markets than in India. For example, skilled resources trained in technologies like Mulesoft, Mode. JS, AngularJS, Open Stack, Open Daylight, MS Azure, Big Data/Analytics, Python and UI/UX are available in the big economies like US.
According to the subject matter experts in India, IT hiring is going to face challenges with increasing trend to deploy more of the US workforce. Most of the companies in the US are duty bound to hire US employees. Therefore, India may not be enjoying the status of the supply base for global IT demand.