55% Indians fear that their skills could become partially or fully obsolete within the next five years.
As AI becomes central to upskilling, a growing number of learners -- from seasoned professionals to school students -- are eager to explore and experiment with technology.
Entry level engineers for these roles can be paid between Rs 4 lakh to Rs 8 lakh annually, which can go beyond Rs 30 lakhs for people with more than eight years of experience.
At a time of massive job losses that is what the much-vaunted Indian IT sector needs. Ritwik Sharma reports.
Despite the dominance of AI, creativity and innovation are the most in-demand skills, reveal LinkedIn's Skills On The Rise 2025 report.
'30 to 40% of the industry needs to be reskilled as existing jobs will go to automation.' 'Reskilling is required as some existing jobs will not be required in the future.'
Air India has laid off more than 180 non-flying staff in recent weeks, sources said while the airline maintained that the affected people were not able to utilise the voluntary retirement schemes and reskilling opportunities. The loss-making Air India was taken over by the Tata Group in January 2022 and since then, efforts are being made to streamline the business model. An Air India spokesperson on Friday said that as part of the fitment process, employees in non-flying functions have been assigned roles based on organisational needs and individual merit.
An increase in the farmer income support scheme PM Kisan Nidhi, the introduction of a 'robot tax' to fund reskilling of people who lose their jobs to artificial intelligence (AI), and a reduced income-tax (I-T) to bring relief to the middle classes - these are some of the items in the Budget wish list submitted by Sangh Parivar affiliates to Finance Minister (FM) Nirmala Sitharaman. Representatives of the affiliates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), such as the farmer organisation Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS); trade union Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS); Laghu Udyog Bharati, which works for micro and small industries; and Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), which works on economic and policy issues, met the FM and other officials over the last couple of weeks as part of the pre-Budget consultations.
The purpose for which AI should be used cannot be left to AI developers, asserts Vice Admiral Biswajit Dasgupta (retd).
The initiative, whose founding partners also include Accenture, CA Technologies, Cisco, Cognizant, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Pegasystems, PwC, Salesforce and SAP, aims to bring competitive training content together on one platform to serve the greater good.
C P Gurnani, CEO & MD of Tech Mahindra, India's fifth-largest IT services company, tells B Dasarath Reddy that the company is exploring both ways as it looks at bringing in best of the breed technologies to offer to global clients.
Jobs requiring AI skills carry a significant wage premium, with some roles offering up to a 25 per cent increase in wages, notes Manoj Nagpal, vice president, professional services, OpenText, an information management company.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India's largest IT services firm, is planning to increase salaries by an average of 7-8 per cent for its offsite employees and 2-4 per cent for its onsite staffers in 2024-25. High performers can expect a raise of 12-15 per cent. The company, which had a headcount of 603,305 as of December 31, 2023, will be closely looking at the promotions and the process may also get pushed to the first quarter of FY25, revealed a source on condition of anonymity, because he is not authorised to speak to the media.
'Asset allocation should be driven much more by long-term factors rather than the market scenario at any particular point in time.'
Severe skilled, unskilled shortage threatens to pull emergency brakes on India's industrial engine.
Quiet hiring allows employees to expand their skill sets, making them more versatile and valuable to the organisation, says Sonica Aron, founder of the HR consultancy firm, Marching Sheep.
Communication skills, negotiation skills, social skills, etiquette, behavioural skills, etc, should be part of your learning. Develop confidence because that's the key to success, advises rediffGURU Archana Deshpande.
Investing the time and resources needed to acquire new skill sets and sharpen existing ones will enable you to stay relevant and make you more employable, says Ankit Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Unstop.
'Use this money to build an emergency fund if you do not have one.'
Interpersonal skills like communication, co-operation and teamwork are valued for fostering a positive and productive work environment.
A bulk of the Paris-headquartered IT major Capgemini's proposed euro 2 billion investment over three years in artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to India, a top official of the company said here on Wednesday. The three areas where the European tech major is investing are talent acquisitions, talent reskilling and for partnerships and creating a centre of excellence (CoE). "We have announced we will be training 100,000 people by the first half of 2024.
The advent of internet of things, blockchain, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars has also created huge business opportunities for online training platforms such as Udacity and Coursera.
'AI may perform tasks, but deep expertise and specialisation remain uniquely human.'
Try to maintain a healthy relationship with people you have worked for and within the past, suggests Sachin Alug.
Reskill and Restart - powered by Infosys Wingspan - takes job seekers on a guided journey, beginning with aptitude and skills assessment, followed by curated job-specific skills training, and culminating in matching them with available positions.
The churn in Indian labour markets will be led by technology-driven sectors like artificial intelligence and machine learning (38 per cent), followed by data analysts and scientists (33 per cent) and data entry clerks (32 per cent).
Wipro is in the news, again. The information technology (IT) services company has mandated freshers, who had opted for a lower salary package of Rs 3.5 lakh per annum, instead of Rs 6.5 lakh per annum, clear a new training module titled Project Readiness Program (PRP) and score at least 60 per cent or stand terminated. Wipro is not the only company to have implemented such a programme.
'With this revamp the anonymous journey of the user will begin wherein he will not have to sign in every time he accesses the app.'
India is in dire need of cybersecurity professionals. With several recent incidents of data breach, India's cybersecurity journey so far proves this demand. But is the country ready to meet this demand and is it preparing a cybersecurity workforce for the unforeseen cyber future? A report titled "India Cybersecurity Services Landscape" by Nasscom-Data Security Council of India (DSCI) predicts that the Indian cybersecurity services industry would grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 21 per cent to touch $13.6 billion by 2025. And by 2022, the industry, which generated a cumulative revenue of about $4.3 billion in 2019, is expected to grow to $7.6 billion. However, around 3.5 million jobs in the cybersecurity space will remain unfilled by the end of 2021.
'A lot of the emphasis when we hire graduates is the learning for these new technologies -- whether it's cloud and digital data analytics, cybersecurity, or IoT, but also some of the new ones, such as Metaverse or other newer areas.'
In 2022, the hybrid work culture will become more relevant to attract and retain talent, while also ensuring they foster a sense of wellness and belonging in the workspace.
Just be transparent about what you have been doing in the past year and support your statements with the growth numbers because that's what managers are interested in, advises Varun Sachdeva.
More than 1,600 employees of Air India, the former state-run carrier now owned by the Tata group, have opted for voluntary retirement under a scheme announced on June 1. These employees comprise 22 per cent of permanent staff (around 7,000). The airline has a total employee strength of around 10,800, including those on contract.
To set up a future-ready administration geared towards the target of $2 trillion exports by 2030, the Department of Commerce has decided to set up a dedicated trade promotion body to drive overall promotion strategy, export targets, and execution as part of a restructuring exercise. The trade promotion body will formulate and drive overall trade promotion strategy; create and drive India's branding across focus markets and sectors; drive coordinated action across missions, states and export promotion councils; strategic initiatives, including advisory and buyer-seller meet; and develop digital platforms for exporters and buyers. Based on a 14-volume 'restructuring dossier' by the Boston Consulting Group, the commerce department has already implemented some of the recommendations.
The only real solution to the jobs crisis, whether in India or abroad, is to direct tech innovation towards job enhancing sectors, and disincentivising job-replacing ones, observes R Jagannathan.
Indian technology industry has a "big opportunity" despite global macroeconomic challenges, said Rishad Premji, chairman of IT services firm Wipro, on Wednesday as he spoke about how Covid-19 had changed work. "My confidence is driven by two things: the rapid pace of digitisation across the world, and the shift in the mindset of stakeholders who engage with us as an industry," said Premji in Bengaluru while addressing industry leaders and civil servants at the Invest Karnataka 2022, the state's Global Investors Meet (GIM). Businesses are using technology for customers and employees: a trend marked by the shift to cloud computing and leverage of data.
Governments need to proactively plan for attracting and retaining the next generation of talent for its civil services, an official report has said.
Having the right know-how and being able to adapt to changing trendsd and industry shifts can make all the difference to how a business functions today.
AI, cloud computing, data analytics are a few areas companies are looking for proficiency in
It is high time to stop playing it safe, overcome our fear of failure and think of becoming entrepreneurs.
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