The Indian IT sector has seen better days. Following US president Donald Trump’s decision to tighten rules around the H-1B visa, the sector was thrown into turmoil and there were reports of massive job cuts on the horizon. Yesterday for instance, there were reports that some of the top notch IT companies including Wipro, were considering making over 50,000 job cuts over the next few months. NASSCOM has just released a statement terming these reports as baseless.
Speaking about the same, NASSCOM stated that such reports are incorrect. Bringing attention to the fact the industry was one of the largest employers in the country, it said that IT continued to be a net hirer with over 1.5 lakh people being employed on a net basis each year.
The organization did concede that the focus in the industry was now shifting from scale to skill. And judging from the change in the hiring practices of these companies that I have personally observed in engineering colleges, this could very well be the case.
Talent and skills are the key building blocks for the industry which is intensifying investment in in skilling / reskilling its workforce to strengthen its foundation on a continuous basis. Additionally, workforce realignment linked to performance appraisal processes is a regular feature every year.
The organization also said that both skilling and workforce realignment were essential in order to remain competitive in international markets. This is particularly relevant in the India context as the country keeps the wheels running in a lot of international corporations through outsourcing.
The organization also said that workforce realignment was a normal part of the internal process of companies. This alignment took place based on their own unique operational imperatives wherein they evaluates their priorities aligned talent to remain competitive. The organization finally noted that it had not observed any significant change so far this year.
