Changing the way forward

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In the light of the current scenario in the IT/ITes industry, professionals are constantly being challenged to prove their talent and ability to add value to the organisations. Changing technologies have clearly left us with an “adapt or perish” scenario.

With thousands of professionals losing their jobs, we are witnessing a growing pessimism among individuals and they are worried about safeguarding their careers. Until a few years ago, these professionals did not feel the need to invest in up-skilling themselves.

But with newer technologies changing the way and related industries are functioning, the shift is compelling everyone to take steady measures to make use of this transformation.

Against this backdrop, Belong’s recently launched Talent Supply Index that shows really high Year over Year Compound Annual Growth Rate for the last three years in the number of jobs that are being hired for in India. The demand for Internet of things has grown by 304 per cent and data science has rocketed by 76 per cent.

There is huge shortfall in skills like mobile development, cloud computing, data engineering and data science. This means firms will have to go beyond conventional hiring solutions to attract and win talent and rethink their current recruiting capabilities.

GST will help in direct and indirect ways. It will help in increasing jobs primarily via the accounting functions within organisation where there are going to be new roles which specialise in related aspects. The major accounting firms have already started training people.

Indirectly, certain sectors are going to see their prices going down, hence resulting in greater demand for these products which will result in jobs getting created. In the short run, there will also be an increase in jobs due to temp hiring (contract hiring) to deal with the ambiguity and fluctuation in demand.

Sectors like logistics and e-commerce are going to be big beneficiaries. Jobs getting generated across levels with temp hiring of course, majority is going to be driven by blue collar jobs.

The Talent Supply Index measures how competitive the market is for a given job by dividing the total number of people with relevant skills.

The index is an effective proxy to help businesses plan and gauge hiring costs, efforts and cycles. The closer the role tends to zero, the more supply-constrained is the market.

In fact, a score of less than one indicates the talent market for the job is supply-negative. Managerial roles like engineering managers and technology leads score a supply-negative 0.6, indicating companies will str uggle to attract leadership talent and scale teams.

Grooming from the ranks appears like an obvious strategy. Mobility for mobile developers, python developers, and data scientists are extremely high. Candidates in these markets move companies faster than any other talent. Compared to software architects whose average tenure per company is 5.3 years, data scientists, on average, spend less than 1.8 years in a company.

Bangalore remains the hotbed of supply and demand for high-value tech talent. While the city accounts for 40 per cent of India’s data scientists, it still scores a supply-negative for data science hiring, indicating the sheer volume of opportunities.

(The writer is co-founder and head of demand generation, Belong)