Is reskilling solution to current IT situation?
With thousands of IT professionals losing their jobs, we are witnessing a growing pessimism amongst individuals who are constantly worried about safeguarding their careers. Until a few years ago, these professionals did not feel a need to invest in upskilling and reskilling themselves. But with newer technologies changing the way IT and related industries are functioning, the shift is compelling everyone to take steady measures to transform and up-skill themselves. Changing technologies have clearly left us with two options either- we adapt or perish. People Matters spoke to Industry experts who shared their viewpoints on the importance of reskilling and upskilling for the sector:
Move -out of comfort zone
Krishna Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, Simplilearn explains in order to survive and thrive in the sector; professionals really need to make efforts and upskill themselves. He says, “With the gloom in the IT industry because of layoffs, professionals are not secure about their jobs anymore. This situation, however, provides a big opportunity for thousands of IT professionals to move out of their comfort zones and up-skill themselves for better roles and salary hikes. With immense scope for career growth in newer technologies like cloud, big data, analytics, digital marketing and DevOps, there is no reason why a professional cannot up-skill.”
Adapt and learn new skills
S. Viswanathan, Chief People Officer at NIIT Technologies, says, “As per the recent NASSCOM report- up to 40% of the IT workforce in India need to be reskilled over the next five years, which is over 1.5 Million professionals who need to gain newer skills to adapt to the rapidly changing technology space. There is a need to expand on training modules to skill larger section of the workforce. NIIT is doing this by its latest reskilling initiative Digilife 2.0, that will help NIITians to gain critical competencies required in order to thrive in the Digital Age. We are training NIITians on cutting-edge niche Digital technologies that will not just help them stay abreast to the latest technology trends but also position them as the ‘first choice’ for digitally savvy customers. Currently, we are focusing on reskilling for emerging technologies and capabilities such as IoT, UI, UX, through systematic training programs.”
Company and employee driven training
Dr. Kiranmai Pendyala, Corporate Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, HR, AMD, says, “In these evolving times, the onus to support skill development lies with the employer. Having said that, we also believe that to survive in a competitive marketplace, employees should invest in their upskilling. Only through a healthy mix of both company and employee driven actions will the workforce help an organization stay ahead of the competition and the technology curve. Re-skilling is an ongoing activity at AMD India and at the very center of our employee value proposition. We believe that learning is akin to breathing, and close to 40% of our existing employees undergo reskilling to help them adapt and adopt design thinking and state of the art tools and technologies to design, build and sell our innovative products. This is also critical because over 90% of our workforce comprises of engineers and since the availability of ready talent, is a constant challenge in the niche semiconductor space, we invest heavily in equipping our employees with future ready skillsets to develop our next generation product pipelines.”
Rethink current recruiting capabilities
Rishabh, Co-founder at Belong explains, “Techies are now focused on adding different skills to their kitty and that has resulted in a rise in the demand of courses from e-learning companies. Firms will have to go beyond mainstream hiring solutions to attract and win talent and rethink their current recruiting capabilities. Belong's recently launched Talent Supply Index shows very high YoY CAGR for the last three years in the number of jobs that are being hired for in India wherein, the demand for IOT is has grown by 304% and Data Science has rocketed by 76%. There is a huge shortfall in skills like mobile development, cloud computing, data engineering and data science.”