While the IT industry is staring at a shift in nature of work due to aggressive invasion of digital technologies, a leading player in the sector has warned that a majority of the workforce cannot imbibe the required skill-sets, and warned of high job losses at middle and senior levels.
“I am not very pessimistic, but it is a challenging task and I tend to believe that 60-65 per cent of them are just not trainable,” Capgemini India’s chief executive Srinivas Kandula said. The domestic arm of the French IT major employs nearly one lakh engineers in the country. “A large number of them cannot be trained. Probably, India will witness the largest unemployment in the middle level to senior level,” he said at the annual Nasscom leadership summit.
He also flagged concerns on the quality of IT workforce, saying much of the 3.9 million IT employees come from low-grade engineering colleges which do not follow rigorous grading patterns for students in their zeal to maintain good records.
The remarks come days after the industry lobby Nasscom said there is a need to re-train up to 1.5 million, or nearly half of its sectoral workforce. “The quality of the students is so bad that many of them are not able to answer even questions from subjects taught in the final semester,” he said. A study published in January had found 80 per cent of engineering graduates ‘unemployable’.