Moneycontrol News
2017 could well be termed as the year of bloodbath for IT employees. With major players including Tech Mahindra, Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant taking decisions to sack employees citing reasons such as cost optimisation or non-performance, employees with redundant skills are no longer welcome. With costs pressure posing a hindrance for reskilling staff, online skilling firms are coming to fill the gap.
Several IT skilling institutes which Moneycontrol spoke to said that IT companies have clearly stated that they will not spend on reskilling their employees.
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Santanu Paul, Co-Founder & CEO, TalentSprint, which provides skilling courses for sectors like IT said that individuals are now expected to pay for learning a new skill. “IT companies are facing cost pressures and they do not have the funds to train employees,” he added.
Traditionally, skilling and advanced education has been partly or fully funded by the company if the employee is about four-to-five years old in the company. Further, individuals are also encouraged to take up short-time courses in management institutes sponsored by the employer. That is no longer the case.
Understandably, skills companies like TalentSprint are eyeing an opportunity. This company is now looking at having courses for IT employees who have been impacted by the recent layoffs in the industry and wish to re-skill themselves.
Niche technology skills are the most in demand. According to a study by online analytics training institute Edvancer, close to 50,000 job vacancies related to analytics are currently available in India. This is expected to rise to 80,000-100,000 in 2018.
Source: Analytics & Data Science India Jobs Study 2017
Aatash Shah, Founder & CEO, Edvancer Eduventures said that last year, there was a demand for 20,000 to 25,000 analytics professionals last year which has now risen 50,000 in this year. Shah said that they are seeing a growth of almost 200 percent every year and there has also been an increase in the number of students being trained every month.
Companies where new age skills like data mining, coding, artificial intelligence and full stack Java programming are the most in demand, human resource experts are of the view that firms want younger talent for the role. This is primarily because they do not want to spend money on upskilling.
Among niche skills, the demand for R (a software language used for data analysis) professionals is the highest among all analytics recruiters. Almost 36 percent of all advertised analytics jobs in India demand for R as a core skill. Python skills comes second at 30 percent of all analytics jobs looking for Python professionals.
Among statistical tools, open source programming tools have picked up the most in recent years, whereas among visualization tools, tableau skills are most in demand with 9 percent of analytics jobs looking for Tableau professionals.
According to a FICCI-EY report on the future of jobs and its implications on the Indian education system, India will reportedly need to create jobs for around 100 million people who enter the job market over the next decade.
An earlier version of this story appeared on this website on May 18, 2017.
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