The Indian IT industry is eyeing at a shift in nature of work due to increasing use of digital technologies but according to a top executive of a leading IT firm, majority of the workforce are not versed with required emerging skill-sets that may results into high job losses at the middle and senior levels.
Srinivas Kandula, Chief Executive Officer, Capgemini-India said, “I am not very pessimistic, but it is a challenging task and I tend to believe that 60-65 per cent of them are just not trainable”. The Indian arm of the French IT major employs nearly 1 lakh engineers in the country.
At the annual Nasscom leadership summit, Kandula said, “A large number of them cannot be trained. Probably, India will witness the largest unemployment in the middle-to-senior leve”.
Raising concerns over the quality of IT workforce available, he said that out of 3.9 million IT employees in the country, most of them come from low-grade engineering colleges which do not follow rigorous grading patterns for students in their zeal to maintain good records. The industry, driven by yield-seeking investors, has not invested enough to upgrade the skill-sets of its employees, he added.
Recently, Nasscom has also raised the same concerns revealing that there is a need to re-train up to 1.5 million, or nearly half of its sectoral workforce.
Showing his concern over the wages offered to a fresher, Kandula said, hiring of students majorly from lower-grade engineering colleges is the reason of negative rise in wages by a huge margin. He further added, the current package for a fresher is around 3.5 lakkh per annum as compared to that of 2.25 lakh per annum two decades ago. It clearly suggests a massive decrease in real wages from an inflation-adjusted perspective.
