The pandemic-induced demand for technology talent and a global shortage of the same has led to companies increasingly depend on sub-contracting and employing gig workers to manage project deadlines.
According to a report released by Nasscom and job portal Indeed in partnership with financial services firm AON, almost 65 percent or two-thirds of the 70 organisations surveyed had employed gig workers in 2022.
This is a slightly higher share as compared to 57 percent organisations opting for gig workers in 2020. Though the share of organizations employing gig workers has increased, their proportion remains less than 5 percent of the total workforce (for companies with more than 2000 full-time employees (FTEs).
However, for smaller organizations with less than 2000 FTEs, gig worker proportion is more than 5 percent.
Gig worker economy is expected to have a gross volume of approximately $455 billion globally by 2023. Indian gig workforce is expected to touch 23.4 million by FY30.
IT companies leading the way
Apart from internal and external gig workers and freelancers focused platforms, top Indian IT services companies like Tata Consultancy Services TCS) and Infosys have their own internal gig work platforms, which help them deploy their own employees for short-duration projects.
Wipro, meanwhile, has an external gig work platform called Topcoder, a global crowdsourcing company with an open global community of over 1.5 million designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers.
Moreover, moonlighting or employees taking up dual jobs have been a cause of concern for the Indian IT sector lately, especially with remote working being the norm and talent shortage. Most of these IT companies don’t approve of moonlighting without prior approval of managers as the companies deal with a lot of confidential data of clients.
Ironically, Wipro had fired nearly 300 employees on finding them moonlighting.
Increased duration and pay
With increasing demand, the duration for which gig workers are employed have also gone up from nine months to more than 12 months, at least for the 25 percent organisations who were open to employ for longer duration.
Compensation, too, has become more structured depending on the skill sets and expertise of the gig workers. “Over 40 pecent of the surveyed organizations decide on a Fixed Fee at the initiation of a Gig Contract. As many as 53% of the surveyed organizations have policies to absorb Gig Workers as full-time employees. Moreover, over 90 percent of the surveyed organizations remain open to re-hiring gig workers in the same or adjacent areas of work based on past performance evaluation,” the report said.
Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM said, “The future workforce will indeed be a blended model wherein the Gig economy is expected to play an important role not only as a talent management strategy but also accelerate job creation and boost the country’s economic growth. As we navigate the new world order, multiple models will co-exist with trust and transparency at the core of it.”
Growing talent pool
Currently, India is well positioned in terms of talent availability. It has the 2nd largest annual supply of STEM graduates, 4x-4.5x higher than the USA, and is also a leader in terms of women diversity among STEM Graduates at 47.1 percent.
“Though the accelerated demand for digital transformation has intensified the talent crunch globally, the gig workforce has emerged as an important talent management strategy for organizations and can play a key role in closing the tech talent demand-supply gap,” the report added.
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