As IT-stocks are in focus, CNBC-TV18's Kritika Saxena caught up with Partha Iyengar of Gartner India to know more about the demand environment of IT companies and the reasons why they aren't doing well.
He said they are moving into a period of weakness for India because the new skills that are needed are not just the next level of technology capabilities but higher level of business and domain understanding, higher level of greater emphasis on the softer skills etc. And this is where individual employees or students are struggling how to retool themselves in this environment.
Neither are companies doing a good job of retooling their internal employees as opposed to laying off. They are not doing a good job as they have done in past transformations and that could be because the earlier transformations were from one technology to other but this is now from technology to business. All this is causing the stress for the companies, said Iyengar.
So going forward there will be a change in the way IT companies hire people and the number of people they hire, he said.
Below is the verbatim transcript of the interview.
Q: Can you tell us about the demand environment of IT companies and the reasons why they are not doing well?
A: We are actually moving into an area of weakness for India because the new skills that are needed are not so much the next level of just technology capability, but it is a higher level of business and domain understanding, it is a higher level of greater emphasis on the softer skills, etc. and this is where I think individual employees or students are struggling, how do they retool themselves in this new environment. I think companies are not doing a good enough job of retooling their internal employees and saying as oppose to laying off 1 percent, we will take that 1 percent and reskill them for the new roles and the new jobs. I don’t think they are doing as good a job as they have done in past transformations.
The reason they are not in my view is that the past transformations were all from one technology to the other, this is now from technology to the business. So that I think different companies haven’t quite got their arms around in terms of how do we create in the analytic space a data scientists that understands the business nuances and the business outcomes and that is what makes them valuable to a client in India or globally, they have not done that well enough and that is really what is causing the stress in the market.
Q: I know there are too many parameters to this but as a result of this do you foresee more job losses, more or lesser hiring from campus perspective and as a result of that again an entire change in the way IT companies hire people now?
A: There will be a change in the way IT companies hire people as well as the change in the numbers that they hire.
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