The demand-supply gap for skills affected the industry’s performance in 2018, due to shortage of 140,000 skilled techies for 500,000 jobs in the industry across verticals
There is an urgent need to re-skill about 50 per cent of India’s IT workforce to address the skill gap in disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics, IT industry trade body Nasscom has said.
As per Nasscom, shortage of a skilled IT workforce to run the new technologies is posing a challenge to the stake-holders.
The demand-supply gap for skills affected the industry’s performance in 2018, due to shortage of 140,000 skilled techies for 500,000 jobs in the industry across verticals, a news agency reported.
Nasscom’s IT-ITeS (IT enabled Services) Sector Skills Council chief executive Amit Aggarwal told the news agency that the industry, in the coming years, will face a shortage of 230,000 skilled techies as jobs in AI and Big Data are estimated to be 780,000 by 2021.
“Adoption of new technologies will change the profile of present jobs, which will evolve into higher domains with more automation that pose challenges to the $167 billion Indian IT services industry,” Aggarwal was quoted as saying.
Besides training the workforce in new skills, there is a need to include evolving technologies in the curriculum for the students, Aggarwal noted.
Nasscom making efforts to boost IT workforce
Mention may be made here that Nasscom has tied up with state-run premier institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras to hone the skills of students entering the workforce in the IT sector.
According to Aggarwal, the industry is spending about Rs 10,000-crore for re-skilling and human resource development.
The World Economic Forum (WEF), in one of its reports, had also pointed out that around 54 per cent of the global workforce are needed to be re-skilled or up-skilled to work in disruptive and digital technologies spawning the virtual world.
The report said that AI, big data analytics and cloud computing will dominate businesses across verticals till 2022, changing job profiles for geeks.
