KOCHI: Elizabeth George, working for a tech firm in Bengaluru, was given a one-year all-expense-paid break by her employer to do a course in business analytics and intelligence at IIM-B.Sreekumar (name changed), a BTech graduate from College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram (CET), declined a good offer from a leading IT firm to pursue his MTech in one of the hot tech sectors. These are not isolated cases.
As business process outsourcing and low-skilled tech jobs dry up in leading IT companies due to automation and artificial intelligence, talented fresh graduates and even experienced software engineers are going for ‘upskill’.They are opting for courses in hot tech areas such as business analytics, cyber security, artificial intelligence and machine learning to stay relevant in the fast-changing sector. “Many people are going for such courses to upgrade their skill set in the latest hot tech areas,” said Elizabeth. “In my company alone, freshers work for a short period, save money before either quitting or taking a break to pursue higher studies.”
The course fee ranges from `3 lakh to `10 lakh, forcing some freshers to work for one or two years and save the desired money. Report by Analytics India, which tracks the job scenario in the emerging tech, termed artificial intelligence as the most trending technology right now.
According to its research, currently there are close to 4,000 open job positions in India, and most of them were created in the past six months.“Even mid-management professionals in IT are looking to take a break to update their skill set in technology, before computers replace them,” said Sreejiraj (name changed), who himself has taken a one-year break to do an online course in analytics.
In Kerala, only Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Kollam, runs course in the emerging tech. It offers MTech and PhD in cybersecurity, providing students with facility to research in areas such as Internet of Things and security, cloud computing, security data visualisation, cyber-physical/networked embedded systems cryptography, healthcare security, big data analytics platform and automotive security.NIT-Calicut professor (training & placement) T K Suresh Babu told Express it is high time the premier engineering institutes in the state began looking to add new streams or update the existing courses as per industry demand.
“We’ve MTech in electrical, instrumentation, etc. We need to add more streams as per the industry requirements. Otherwise, we won’t be doing justice to the students,” said Suresh Babu.
A report by market-analysis firm HfS Research recently said due to a rise in adoption of automation and artificial intelligence, the number of low-skilled workers in the domestic IT and BPO service sectors could fall from 24 lakh in 2016 to 17 lakh in 2022.
Medium-skilled jobs
On the other hand, the number of medium-skilled jobs in IT/BPO industry in India could rise from nine lakh to 10 lakh by 2022, and that of high-skilled jobs to 5,10,000 in 2022 from 3,20,000 in 2016.
The average salary too for the hot tech jobs are more than double what the freshers would command now for their normal ‘IT service work’. Suresh Babu said companies who send their staff for upskilling are using them to train their select staff once they return after the course.