The Indian tech industry will add another three million new jobs in the next five years, said Indian Staffing Federation (ISF), the apex body for the ‘flexi’ working industry.
With the additions, the size of the country’s tech army will be 7 million by 2023.
Rituparna Chakraborty president, ISF, told The Hindu that all these new jobs would come up in digital technology areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, Internet of things (IOT), data science, analytics, big data, blockchain and augmented reality. Jobs would also be created in newer technology areas that are presently unknown but are expected to emerge and evolve in the next few years.
The ISF’s tech employment projection comes as a big relief to millions of young techies and software engineering students amid talks of the move towards jobless growth with automation that replaces humans with robots. “We, at ISF, are confident of making this job projection for the next five years based on our constant interactions with a wide range of companies, including Indian tech firms, MNCs, global capability centres of hundreds of international firms, enterprises across segments including e-com, BFSI, pharma and telecom,” she said,
There is a visible behavioural change happening in the IT and ITes sectors, Ms. Chakraborty added.
India now has about 1,300 captive units. Some 400 new captive units are coming up in 2019. “The shift is attributed to a sharp rise in hiring by existing and new global in-house centres (GCCs) due to technology innovation activities in India for their global markets.”
Changing technology
Ms. Chakraborty further said the industry had been witnessing winds of change in technology. Today, a robot, with infinite memory analytical capacity, is connected to the cloud. It’s impact on productivity of businesses would be ‘huge’. Some 63% of CEOs think that AI would have a larger impact than the Internet and some 39% of them had already started AI-related initiatives in their organisations.
Ms. Chakraborty further said, “I would like to emphasise the fact that India does not have a job problem, but it has an employed poverty problem.
“When we think about addressing this problem, the only sustainable way to achieve this is through formalisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and financialisation of the human capital.”
Staffing organisations in India are going to play a vital role in helping the industry reach this hiring milestone in terms of identifying and sourcing billable talent Ms. Chakraborty added.
