PUNE: In the post recession strategic times, the Information Technology (IT) industry is facing a tricky scenario in which quality of talent within companies has increased while quality of skills available in the job market has dwindled.
This perception surfaced at a national level Human Resources ( HR) meet here this week where top representatives of the industry deliberated on the theme ‘Opportunities & Challenges in IT Industry-Post Recession’.
The focus of the meet was to understand the changing needs of the industries and its expectations from the educational institutions which the participants felt would be called upon to bridge the gap between the required talent and available manpower for the IT sector which underwent difficult phase in the last one year.
“Last one year has been a year of acid test for industry in general and IT sector in specific, where India has been leading. Still the revenues of India’s business and technology services companies have grown from USD four billion in 1998 with a short dip in 2009 and is expected to rise upto USD 60 billion a year by 2010 as per National association of Software and Services companies (NASSCOM) survey,” said Sudhendra Chatterjee, Vice President, Cognizant technologies .
“This year with required correction done in the economy, IT industry is looking forward to enhance the business by focusing on talent acquisition after recession and to cross the difficult road ahead,” commented Vikas Joshi, Managing Director, Harbinger Systems .
The discussion during the conference revealed that business would no longer run on the old rules, but “new out of the box solutions” more comprehensive efforts, innovative thinking, new skills and competencies would be required to grow and prosper.
The participants felt that the demand for both the quantity and the quality of talented employees will grow worldwide with companies that have fired employees in the past already feeling the pinch, as they do not have enough bandwidth to execute.
During the economic downturn, companies were able to downsize by getting rid of redundant work force and dead wood. They also restructured the employees compensation (mostly by decreasing) to stave off financial losses. Only those employees were retained who proved their worth.
The employees had to accept all kinds of compensation related compromises while maintaining the same or even higher level of efficiency and productivity, according to the conclusions drawn at the meet, organised by Management Association of MCA institutes (MAMI).
These survivors got the opportunity to handle a variety of tasks that further sharpened their skills and made them multi-skilled. Thus, overall quality of talent has increased.
