According to an HFS Research, it is said that By 2021, the IT industry worldwide would see a net decrease of 9% in headcount, or about 1.4 million jobs, with countries like the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States also taking hits.
IT industry body The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) said that the report may not have taken into account all the jobs being created by newer technologies.
But all is not disheartening, the HFS report states that though "low-skilled" jobs will fall by 30%, "medium-skilled" jobs will increase by 8% and high-skilled jobs will rise by 56%.
If low-skilled jobs will be adversely impacted the high-skilled jobs will show a promising rise. Low-skilled jobs are jobs which are repetitive in nature and do not require any special expertise and qualification. Such jobs can be easily automated.
"The BPO industry is going to be facing the problem of robotic process automation in the next two years. This is a challenge the industry and the country will face," Asheesh Mehra, CEO of BPO firm Antworks, said.
On the other hand, high-skilled jobs require creative problem solving, analytics and critical thinking. Implementing automation for such jobs is challenging and the industry is not ready for it yet.
Another report highlights another major issue—the huge gap between new IT jobs created and the number of engineers completing their graduation. Approximately more than 15 lakh new engineers enter the job market every year, but the jobs available for them has shrunk to 2-2.5 lakh. This results in a severe competition among freshers and experienced engineers.
Areas which will see high demand and lucrative salaries are:
- big data,
- analytics,
- machine learning,
- mobility,
- design,
- Internet of Things (IoT) and
- artificial intelligence.
Due to big data, the demand for data scientists is on the rise.
Data scientists are not only relevant to IT but sectors like the manufacturing, R&D, banking and financial sectors and the expanding e-commerce companies also need their services.
Big data analysts need to have knowledge of:
- computer science,
- analytics and statistics skills,
- strong communication skills and
- a working knowledge of business intelligence tools.As Internet speeds increase, the need for maintaining and managing internet infrastructure is also going to grow.
Experienced people with the following profiles will be in demand:
- digital marketing expert,
- marketing technologist and
- solution architects, who have both business and technical know-how and areable to align the two.
The areas where jobs will show an increase in the future are:
- mobile application development
- cloud computing
- IT infrastructure risk analysis
- Online security
- Developers with experience in user-interface (UI) and
-
user-experience (UX)
- Data visualization experts with the skills to present data with simplicity
- healthcare
- transportation
- real estate
- Operations & Logistics of eCommerce Startups
According to one more blog post by Phil Fersht, The jobs aren't "going away" - they've already pretty much gone .
Hence, if this trend and data proves to be true, only innovation and adapting to the new technologies is going to make the companies survive.
