Indian IT industry, virtually the backbone of country’s services sector and exports, has been in news for past some time, and not for all good reasons. Plummeting quarterly earnings, layoffs by prominent corporates – including Cognizant, Infosys and Tech Mahindra – and the protectionism stance adopted by many countries importing IT services from India have all spiked the tensions, which seem to be at all-time high.
A promising career of an Information Technology graduate, from an esteemed institute like IIT/NIT or even from a mediocre Tier-3 city-based engineering college, was never expected to see such unprecedented downfall. Let’s ponder upon some facts.
Is it only the so-called media-hyped H-1B visa issue that requires the industry and its workforce re-think their strategy? A few thous and such visa holders, employed by American companies owing to their expertise in technology, cannot represent the massive workforce that is deployed within the Indian borders and is facing an extreme challenge of being out of the job.
Many engineering colleges applied for closure of operations and the already passed out bunch of IT engineers is struggling to find meaningful jobs. It is now in the open that Infosys, which hired fresh graduates at h andsome packages until a couple of years ago, now offers a meagre sum that doesn’t even matches the package of a commerce graduate hired by a public sector bank.
The conventional job of an IT professional in India involves programming, testing and some other straight tasks. Automation and shift to newer technologies have made many such skills obsolete; today you can get a website or even a mobile app built up using automated tools; thus both programming and testing for this purpose is no longer an exceptional skill.
It isn’t the H-1B issue or the changes made by Singapore in their visa policy for IT professionals; it is rather the outmoded skills of Indian engineers that are increasing wiping profits and compelling companies to reduce their workforce to maintain operating ratios.Corrective actions, if we need the gem of our services and export sector to revive, are to be taken sooner than later.
And stakeholders are all – the government that must push even IITs, IIITs and NITs, alongside other private engineering institutions to rationally work out their curricula and adopt newer studies by collaborating with giants like Google and Amazon; engineering aspirants who must not fall trap to a meaningless B.Tech degree but crave for real skill development in robotics, blockchain and cloud computing; the industry that must realign its workforce to learn and use latest technological innovations in operations rather than resorting to mass layoffs.
Skill development will not only help in reviving the decreasing dem and for software services and preventing layoffs but will help counter attack the problems like that of H-1B visa because any country will always be in dem and of highly talented people and will be ready to acquire them at a h andsome salary package.
Let’s not ignore the fact that IT industry has been fueling growth in other crucial economic sectors like real estate and tourism; let not the sector lose its sheen so easily.
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