Forget all doomsday forecasts, India’s IT employment will double in five years

Indian IT companies have gracefully transitioned three S-curves—mainframe, client-server, and internet—but their ability to reinvent themselves over the next 10 years depends on a massive re-imagining of their people supply chain. Training will need to be shorter and more online. Organisational structures need to morph from cylinders to pyramids on their way to Eiffel Towers. This means sharper performance management that may include a replication of the Colonel Threshold of the Army (if you are not shortlisted for promotion at this stage, you retire early). Committing to campus hires a year ahead with no clarity in demand has led to postponed or unhonoured offers that are bad for brands; fresher hiring will need to move to an apprenticeship model that creates learning-by-doing and learning-while-earning but allows employers to take students for a test-drive. Employers will also need to explore, prepare, match, and deploy partnerships with universities for just-time supply. And employee costs needing to be more variable than fixed, which means that a larger proportion of the workforce will have to be on fixed-term contracts. Finally, delivery models where groups of people from various horizontals worked in an inefficient linear workflow need to be reconfigured into a collection of full-stack development with industry expertise.

With the employment in IT shifting from a lifetime contract to a taxicab relationship, employees will have to think about their personal brands, continuously upgrade technical skills, and nurture soft skills. Upskilling is key to the wage premium; a programmer with Java /C #/Python skills can become more relevant in three weeks along with database skills in Mysql/Oracle/MS-SQL. An 8-10% wage premium comes from three weeks of investment in HTML/JS /CSS. A 15% wage premium comes from a four-week investment in server-side programming skills like servlets/JSP/Struts/Spring/Hibernate with familiarity of frameworks such as EJB that starts the journey into becoming a full-stack developer. Another 20% wage premium comes from four months of intense learning of more server-side programming using the Groovy/Grails/Django framework and learning niche front-end development skills like Angular JS/React JS. At this point, the programmer should choose an industry vertical and spend another 2 months becoming MEAN by picking up skills like Mongo DB, Node.js, and Express.js. The rest of the year can be spent picking up Python, R, Hadoop, and AWS/Azure. Extending interactions with colleagues in Infra will help relate to server management and the impact of code on the performance of applications. The employee, at the end of three years, should hence aim at having a set of keys that opens any doors to the web at a premium she commands. Employers will be increasingly frugal with training budgets, but employees have options that include external certifications, MOOCs, building applications for fun alongside a community to practice, code challenges, and hackathons.

There are important upsides and downsides for education policy makers. The downside is that the huge wage premium in IT meant that annual engineering capacity expanded from 3 lakh to 15 lakh over the last 15 years, but the demand-side for 3 lakh freshers per year will not change soon. This means excess capacity will need to go off the market, or its hardware and software will have to be rejigged for other vocations. But the upside is that engineers will finally be available to other professions; this synchronises with the surge in India’s spending and hiring for domestic consumption and infrastructure. This shift—if supported by regulatory change—could greatly expand vocational universities, apprenticeships, and online learning. The notion that India’s IT employment will decline is delusional; the future is bright but is different from the past. But the future does lie in IT companies making their brittle people supply chains more flexible.