As slowdown hits hiring and jobs in the IT industry, employees are beginning to worry about their jobs. With reports of firms shedding jobs, experts in the industry are asking the employees, particularly those at the middle level, to equip themselves with additional skills to become relevant.

Pegasystems, a platform that lets firms to rapidly deploy and change applications to meet business needs, will launch a pilot to make IT employees in the middle level re-employable. “To test this model, we are going to invite IT employees at the lateral level working in different firms to join the pilot where they will be trained in Pega tools. The additional skill sets will encourage firms to retain them,” Pegasystems India Managing Director and Country Head Suman Reddy Eadunuri, told BusinessLine .

To give them confidence, Pega will not only refund the fee of all those who successfully complete the course but also consider absorbing them into the firm. After seeing the feedback, the firm will scale up the initiative in order to make more IT employees Pega ready.

There are about 35,000 Pega developers in the world, about 65 per cent of them in India. IT firms deploy Pega certified engineers to roll out Pega platform solutions for clients.

“We are doing a training course for Infosys with 300 of its employees. We see this trend will grow because of the impact of the slowdown,” Reddy said.

He said the firm, which has about 1,500 employees in Hyderabad and 500 in Bengaluru, would add 500 people in the next 18 months.. “We have a capacity of 2,000 in all, which we would like to fill up in the next 18 months,” he said.

Pega developers

In order to increase the availability of Pega developers, the firm has tied up with eight engineering colleges. “As many as 1,050 students have been trained in Pega tools. They will be graduating in a year with Pega certification. About 40 per cent of them have already been hired by different firms,” he said.

He claimed that employees with Pega certification would get 30-35 per cent more compensation.

Product expansion

Reddy said customers were building a lot of front office apps such as customer onboarding, sales and marketing as opposed to traditional BPM which was back-end, related to work flow management.

He said the firm focussed only on 3,000 firms and Indian firms. “We don’t want to sell solutions to small players,” he said.

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