IT jobs to shift to new tech, data analytics, cloud services

The $70-billion Indian IT export services industry, which recorded a 12.6 per cent year-on-year growth in FY 2015 and employs 1.2 million people, is all set to witness shrinkage in jobs over the next three years.

While demand for traditional IT services will dip, demand for niche skills in next-generation technologies such as Cloud, Social, Mobility, Big Data, Analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) will result in a war for talent.

“Over a three year horizon the total number of jobs in IT services will witness a 10 per cent shrinkage as the legacy business continues to evaporate and next-generation technology services are in demand by global customers” Jaideep Mehta, Managing Director, IDC India and South Asia told BusinessLine .

“Low-end, low-skilled software developers and infrastructure maintenance engineers will become redundant. While IT services firms will endeavour to re-skill or re-shuffle this low-end talent and re-deploy them; those who are unable to transition into newer technologies will be no longer be relevant.

“New skill sets will be in demand, such as, Cloud architects, Security specialists, IT administrators, Analytics and IoT experts, etc, resulting in a war for the same talent,” Mehta predicts.

Concurring with Mehta, Rishi Das, CEO of CareerNet Consulting, said: “As systems become more intelligent with automation, artificial intelligence and big data analysis, IT productivity will improve by 10-20 percentage points and manpower addition will shrink by about 8-10 per cent over the next three years. For instance, customer support will move to a self-service model enabled via mobiles; coding jobs will also shrink as a lot of domain-specific software will be available on the Cloud, deployed and used with a little bit of customisation.”

K Harishankaran, co-founder of HackerRank, which has a database of 1 million Indian and global programmers on its platform, is also of the opinion that when hiring stabilises over the next 3-5 years, it could lead to a 10-15 per cent shrinkage in recruitment.

He points out that currently, demand for quality talent in engineering, product development, DevOps, Big Data, Analytics and Mobile apps development especially for iOS and Android apps, is on the rise but difficult to find.

According to Nasscom data, the Indian IT & BPO industry added 200,000 jobs in FY 2015, of which 80 per cent were in traditional services.

Sangeeta Gupta, Senior Vice-President of Nasscom, admitted that the rate of job creation in traditional IT services will shrink as the industry gradually moves toward automation and digital technologies.

This will be offset by brisk hiring by product companies, start-ups, consumer internet firms and even large brick and mortal retail chains, that are all looking to invest in providing online and mobile access, she said.

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