While 2017 was a year of disruption for Indian job landscape in general, experts said that the country’s IT sector could expect to see an addition of about 2 lakh (200,000) new jobs in the sector.
Owing to the wide adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), Indian job market is currently undergoing a continuous change. To adapt with the changing job landscape, experts suggested that upskilling is the only way for employees to survive in such transitory phase. While the rise of automation technologies might lead to job losses for some segments, particular sectors such as mobile manufacturing, Fintech and startups will see shiny hiring opportunity instead.
Regarding to this matter, General Manager of IT staffing for TeamLease Services, Alka Dhingra said that there needs to be improvements in financial services and digital businesses to increase investments in digitisation and automation, as well to create conducive investment climate. Such increase in investments are expected to result in overall business growth.
Mr Dhingra added that the uptick in hiring will be attributed to new employers, given that around 20 percent more employers are likely to hire in the new year. Thanks to this trend, the Indian IT sector is expected to add about 1.8 to 2 lakh new jobs. As the country is heading towards Digital India, as much as 50 percent workforce in the industry is expected to be equipped with digital skills, The Times of India reports.
“The growing opportunities in the digital technology arena including government initiatives like Digital India will add jobs in digital technologies, AI, Robotics. In fact, AI alone will create 2.3 million jobs globally by 2020,” he said.
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Sharing the same sentiment, Vice President for Employee Experience India at Adobe Systems, Abdul Jaleel stated that the new age of technologies has intensified the need for digitised workplaces and meaningful employee experiences. This makes employee retention and growth of high-performance employees a greater challenge for organisation, as the advent of automation at workplace will lead to the conception of newer roles fuelling the demand for expertise in novel avenues.
Recent FICCI-Nasscom and EY report revealed that by 2022, 9 percent of India’s 600 million estimated workforce would work in new jobs that do not even exist today. According to the report, there would be a job slowdown for the next two years, owing to firms’ restructuring their business models to adapt with digital transformation. And by 2022, the entire job landscape would see a drastic change.
Employability assessment company, Aspiring Minds suggested that software-IT and customer service workers would be the most vulnerable to the automation drive in the future. However, cognitive skills such as inductive and deductive reasoning would be unaffected by automation. Coupled with high demand, these skills will emerge as the most sought-after skills in the upcoming years.
Meanwhile, general management and marketing are at the least risk of automation as these roles require high critical and logical reasoning abilities to support creative and rational decision making, which make them hard to replace with automated machine.
Read also: Top 5 Workplace Trends for 2018
