BENGALURU: The IT industry in the country is going through a huge retrenchment. There is a growing stress for hiring local in countries such as the US and Australia, rather than resorting to outsourcing of jobs. A number of lower rung jobs are vanishing owing to automation.
As a result, IT professionals are seeing a need to acquire newer skills to stay relevant and companies are stressing on reskilling their existing workforce rather than hiring fresh talent.
As much as 90 percent of these IT companies are resorting to a very unique method of doing this and that is through gamifying learning, according to a survey by Pluralsight, an enterprise tech learning platform.
The survey called ‘Leveraging Gamification for learning in the Indian tech industry’ was carried out across 106 organisations in the services and product space.
As many as 568 IT professionals across Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, NCR, Kolkata and Ahmedabad participated in this and another survey on overall learning trends in technology.
A N Rao, senior vice-president and global head, Cognizant Academy (the Learning and Development function of the IT giant) says that the learning behaviour and aptitude of the present workforce has drastically changed. “There is a massive explosion of gamification.
The skill life-cycle is very short as of now. Learning, practice and assessment today is all needed at the same time and gamification addresses such learning needs. We ourselves have as many as 18 tracks of learning in the gamification mode.”
Rao highlighted the care that needs to be taken in designing a game. “The design needs to take care of individual success as well as encourage competition. It is a big investment,” says Rao who highlighted how his company even employed P.hD’s in psychology to design such learnign based games.
While it is usually thought that gamification is for younger workers, as many as 47 percent of the industry considers seniors above eight years of experience as the target audience for learning through gamification.
“Games can also be used by seniors to highlight the roles of a leader. This can be done through virtual reality, augmented reality, real-time artificial intelligence tools,” says Rao.
Giving the example of a Game of Thrones or Clash of Clans, Rao highlighted how efficiency greatly increased at his company through gamification. “The quantity of people writing code tripled and the ability to to get to new projects also increased three times. The impact (of gamification) is not trivial,” says Rao.
Arun Rajamani, country head and general manager, Pluralinsight, says that the present scenario of retrenchment is just one of the cycle of disruption in the industry. He highlighted how the life cycle of tech skills is presently two and a half years and how it would soon be just one year very soon. “Skills are changing and roles are also changing. There is a need for consolidation of skill sets. Clients usually ask for one person who can handle an entire project. People need to take ownership for their own skilling,” he says.
Mrinal Basu is an IT professional who works primarily on the mainframe process in a company in the city. He says, “There is obviously a push towards employees acquiring more and more skills. With the market tightening and threat of layoffs looming large, those who can show their worth through new skills are the ones who will survive the layoff storm,” he says.
Mrinal himself feels the need to get enrolled into a course in Hadoop (a programming framework that deals with very large data). He however thinks gamification is waste of time, so far as learning is concerned. “While I think I would enjoy the game, so far as indepth learning is concerned, I do not think it is possible through a game,” he says.