Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The Indian Information Technology companies are set to hire over 96,000 people in India by 2022.
New jobs are being created with the evolution of technology and increasing automation, the changes in nature of traditional technology jobs and roles, industry body National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) said.
“The industry continues to be a net hirer of skilled talent, adding 138,000 people in FY2021, and robust hiring plans for FY22 with the top 5 Indian IT companies planning to add over 96,000 employees. The industry is up-skilling more than 250,000 employees in digital skills and has hired more than 40,000 fresh digitally trained talent, indicating its commitment and investment towards rapid enhancement of workforce capabilities,” NASSCOM said, responding to some reports that automation would mean job losses in the IT sector.
Earlier, a Bank of America (BoA) report had claimed that the Indian IT sector, which employs 16 million people and is looking at a USD 350 billion turnovers by 2025, could sack 3 million employees, out of the nine million low-skilled workers, because of increased automation.
“TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra and Cognizant and others appear to be planning for a 3 million reduction in low-skilled roles by 2022 because of RPA up-skilling.
The business process management 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, NASSCOM said.
Around 33 percent of the total jobs in the BPM, sector were related to customer interaction services (e.g. call center work including mail, chat, etc). Most of the customer work from India is now being done in an omnichannel model and involves higher-end expertise with technology and automation already built into the processes.
Automation and robotic process automation (RPA) has been maturing in the last three 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 billion, leaving significant headroom for growth and jobs, according to the industry body.
“The 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 pipelines 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 added.