India’s IT software industry has robust hiring plans with the top five companies including TCS, Infosys, HCL Tech and Wipro planning to add over 96,000 employees in the current financial year (2021-22). This comes on top of the 138,000 skilled people that were recruited in 2020-2021, according to a Nasscom statement released on Thursday.
In view of some recent news reports based on a talking about the apparent job losses in the Indian IT/BPM industry, NASSCOM, the representative body for the IT industry, said it would like to put things in perspective around hiring and job creation in the sector.
With the evolution of technology and increasing automation, the nature of traditional IT jobs and roles will evolve overall leading to creation of newer jobs, NASSCOM said.
The Industry is upskilling more than 250,000 employees in digital skills and has hired more than 40,000 fresh digitally trained talent, which shows its commitment and investment towards rapid enhancement of workforce capabilities, the report states.
The recent report on the job scenario has some great insights on the Future of Work and other emerging trends. However, certain data points on job displacement in IT/BPM sector are incorrect and for the following reasons
The BPM sector in India, which has been called out as the sector ripe for automation, employs over 1.4 million people (excluding domestic and in-house) and not 9 million as the report suggests. The IT-BPM sector overall employs 4.5 million people as of March 2021.
Around 33% of the total jobs in the BPM sector are related to customer interaction services (e.g. call centre work including mail, chat etc). Most of the customer work from India is now being done in an omni-channel model and involves higher end expertise with technology and automation already built into the processes. Automation and RPA has been maturing in the last 3 years and has led to a net creation of jobs for the BPM sector. The addressable opportunity for BPM according to a NASSCOM-McKinsey Report is $180-220 bn, leaving significant headroom for growth and jobs. BPO industry in India is constantly innovating on reimagining processes for global customers – building products, leverage analytics, customer experience and the announcement by all companies showcases the growth in a pandemic year and opportunity ahead.
With one of the strongest deal pipeline, and strong business outlook, the industry is on track to meet its vision of $300-350 billion revenues by 2025. The Industry will continue to be a net creator of jobs and is committed to people-centric innovation, relentless talent focus, and delivering a superior transformative customer experience, NASSCOM said.
The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM®) is the premier trade body and chamber of commerce of the Tech industry in India and comprises over 3000-member companies. Its membership spans across the entire spectrum of the industry from start-ups to multinationals and from products to services.
