BENGALURU: Over 2 million IT employees are expected to leave their jobs by 2025. This comes at a time when the Indian IT industry is struggling with a 23-25% attrition rate, and IT companies are taking various steps to retain employees.
Tech staffing firm TeamLease Digital has launched ‘Talent Exodus Report’, which says that IT companies are experiencing dysfunctional turnover where the best employees of companies are voluntarily leaving at higher rates.‘Brain Drain’s is at present plaguing the IT industry and the report says employees are re-evaluating their careers and they prefer flexibility.
Currently, over 5 million people are working in the country’s $227 billion IT industry. While IT company Infosys reported the highest attrition of 28.4% in the first quarter, Wipro’s attrition rate stood at 23.3%. In case of contract staffing, attrition for the current fiscal will be up to 55% compared to 49% in the last fiscal. One of the ways to reduce attrition is to tap into the smaller cities/tier-2 and 3 cities for acquisition of talent, the report adds. Sunil Chemmankotil, chief executive officer, TeamLease Digital, said,
“With the global pandemic disrupting the IT hiring chain, there is evidence of a reverse trend, which indicates that retaining a business-critical talent has undergone a great change in the last two years.” The survey indicates that 57% of IT professionals would not consider returning to the IT services sector in the future. The sector contributed 9% to the national GDP and accounted for 51% of services exports. It also added a total of 4.5 lakh freshers in FY23, which is the highest addition in a single year.
Apart from this, moonlighting or dual employment is the other challenge the industry has been facing for a few months now. Aditya Narayan Mishra, MD and CEO of CIEL HR Services said that avoiding moonlighting is not the solution. “Organisations should evolve a policy to lay down the rules for taking up a second assignment on the side. As long as the second assignment doesn’t hurt the other and helps employees fulfil their aspirations to take up interesting challenges,” he said.
IT industry attrition rate
Currently, over 5 million are working in the $227 billion IT industry. While IT company Infosys reported the highest attrition of 28.4% in Q1, Wipro’s attrition rate stood at 23.3%.