Information Technology Industry

Human Resource Management in Information Technology Industry

5 ways to ensure longevity in tech career

IT professionals need to stay abreast of rapid advancements and disruptions in a continuously evolving industry in order to ensure that their skillset always remains relevant.

Stay Up to DateNothing will ensure your longevity in the technology industry better than keeping yourself updated on latest trends and knowhow. It is also important for IT professionals to be flexible and adopt changes as and when they come, as stagnation can occur very quickly and easily within the industry

Keep Skillset SharpenedThere are certain skills you must constantly keep sharp in order to stay in demand in a tech career. A technology professional must have good project management skills to handle projects in a precise and organised manner. Keep your communication skills sharp to put your point across to people from non-technical backgrounds in the simplest of terms.

Do More than Coding

While it is important to stay ahead of the times and keep your skills updated, you should also aim to be more than a coder, as it is increasingly being expected of technologists nowadays.

"The new buzzword is 'full stack engineer', meaning one who has the exposure and ability to develop, test, operationalise and deliver," says Pankaj Khanna, vice president of talent acquisition at Mindtree.

Use Self-Coaching

Self-coaching is as important as formal training in a technology career.

"Good companies will offer you learning platforms that contain a combination of learning e-modules, buddy-mentor programmes, internal skill-communities, workshops and sessions on upcoming IT trends. Pick a company that has a wide domain spread of industry groups and a decent market reputation," says Khanna.

Demonstrate Interest

It is not enough to keep track of changes in the technology industry. Be knowledgeable about what is going on, understand your own interest in the areas of change and be passionate about learning and developing new skills.

http://m.economictimes.com/slideshows/work-career/5-ways-to-ensure-longevity-in-your-tech-career/demonstrate-interest/slideshow/54971323.cms

Every year, India produces an estimated 10 lakh (1 Million) engineering graduates, of which two lakh (0.2 Million) are recruited by IT companies. In 2010, these companies hired 1.7 lakh engineers and in 2011, they offered jobs to two lakh.

Facts [+]

2012:Unemployment rate in the information technology is comparatively lower than the manufacturing sector in India.

5 biggest employers of Indian IT

TCS

TCS is among the world's largest employers in the technology sector, with over 3 lakh employees. According to the company, it has over 319,000 employeesspread across 46 countries. The company is also expected to hire about 60,000 employees in its current financial year.

Infosys

Infosys is the second-largest India-based IT services company going by 2014 revenues and has a 1,76,187-strong workforce. Globally, Infosys has 85 sales and marketing offices and 100 development centers (as of March 31, 2015).

IBM

Tech giant IBM has over 4.3 lakh employees worldwide. The company's Indian subsidiary, said to be among one of the biggest IT employers, is reported to have over 1.5 lakh employees in the country.

Wipro

IT consulting company has 158,217 employees (as of March 31, 2015). It was incorporated on December 29, 1945, in Mumbai by Azim Premji as 'Western India Vegetable Products Limited, later abbreviated to Wipro.

The company entered IT services industry in 1990s and today serves clients in 175-plus cities across six continents.

Accenture

Accenture recently shot past Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in headcount in its latest quarter. According to the company's chief financial officer, David Rowland, Accenture ended the quarter with a global headcount of about 336,000 people, and it now has approximately 237,000 people in its global delivery network.

The company also plans to hire 95,000 in FY2015. Though India-specific figures are not available, Accenture is counted among top tech employers in the country.

IT slowdown leaves engineers without work.

Facebook hires software engineers from India to fill US posts

Mar, 2012,: Facebook, the world's largest social networking site, is doing something that no domestic or multinational company has done before - hire software engineers from India for positions based in the United States.

Typically, global firms such as IBM and GE hire in India for positions here and send some of these recruits abroad for specific projects. However, Facebook's open invitation in a newspaper advertisement last week seeking applicants "to work in the US" is being regarded as a first.

Mobile phone applications creating jobs

The demand for Mobile phone applications has created 466,000 jobs in the U.S. since 2007. That's based on an analysis released Tuesday by technology trade group TechNet.

Paper resume could be thing of the past

WASHINGTON: Two young Indian-American entrepreneurs are attempting to make the traditional paper resume a thing of the past by connecting the job seeker and the employer through video resumes.

The Palo Alto Mayor, Yiaway Yeh, and several other top corporate leaders of the city - which is known as the heart of the Silicon Valley -- lined up last Thursday in its downtown to inaugurate the new office of GetHired.Com, which currently has just 14 employees.

GetHired.com is the first job board to embed video capabilities directly into its social recruiting platform so that job seekers can record and submit personal, dynamic responses to an employer's most pressing pre-screening questions at the start of the hiring process.

As a result, employers are able to quickly find top candidates with good communication skills who are a culturally fit for their organisation, he notes.

"GetHired.com combines the visibility of a job board with the functionality of an applicant tracking system - allowing employers to find and pre-screen candidates using audio and video, conduct interviews in real-time and manage the entire on boarding process," he said.

Only 17% engineers are fit to enter IT services, says report

Feb 2012, India: Less than one-fifth of the total numbers of engineering graduates are fit to be employable in the IT services sector, said the National Employability Report 2011, released by Aspiring Minds.

"India has a sizable engineering talent pool. However, only 17.45% are fit to enter the IT services industry," Himanshu Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO, Aspiring Minds said. The country produces about five lakh engineers every year.

The report also revealed the percentage of ready-to-deploy engineers for IT product jobs is dismally low at 2.68%. This is because jobs in IT product companies require a strong understanding of computer programming and algorithms, besides soft skills and cognitive skills.

But the study found that the candidates strongly lacked the required skills. "The skills required by the IT product companies at the entry level are very much a part of the curriculum of engineering colleges, which is a worrying sign for higher education," according to the report.The Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) industry is likely to find 9 out of every 100 engineers employable, while in hardware and networking profiles, the employability stood at 36.75%.

It was found that 50% of employable candidates for IT services companies and 28% of employable candidates for IT product companies are not even in the top 750 colleges, and thus form an invisible pool to most employers, the report said.

Temporary staff - the in-thing in IT companies

BANGALORE: The number of temporary staff employed by tech firms has gone up dramatically in the past two years. In fact, they've been quietly hiring more temp staff for many quarters now. That's the key reason why they don't talk about wellstocked benches (bench refers to employees not currently on a project).

Temp workers account for 10% to 15% of the actual employee base of IT companies today, against 2% to 5% a few years ago. This share is expected to go up to 20% to 25% in the coming quarters, say temp staffing experts.

A quick check run by the Indian Staffing Federation, an apex body of temp staffing firms in the country, among its eight key members at its recent board meeting indicated that the demand for temp staffing by tech providers would go up by 40% to 45% in the next couple of years. Mafoi Randstad, TeamLease, Kelly Services, Adecco India, Manpower and GI Staffing Services, Alegiss and Global Innovesource are the leading players in this space which includes 20 small and medium firms too.

Vipul Prakash, vice-president, Indian Staffing Federation, told reporters, "Temp staffing helps tech firms maintain a healthy bench position, while still having quick access to a large pool of talent."

There is buoyancy in temp hiring among IT companies, confirms E Balaji, CEO, Ma Foi. In fact, there could be a time when IT companies start giving a break-up of employee bases under core-headcount and temphead count categories. Enterprises across business domains, mostly IT firms, seem to be quickly adopting temp staffing to beat margin pressures , maintain lean benches and also facilitate just-in-time hiring in a highly volatile market. Sudhakar Balakrishnan , MD, Adecco India says, "Ttemp staffing is fast catching up among tech firms in India. The space is witnessing a bullish growth."

Domestic companies didn't believe much in temp staffing until recently. Temp staff account for 20% to 25% of the global workforce. This is having a rub-off effect on their Indian counterparts, say staffing experts.

"The trend has been registering a steep growth. Temp staffing is slowly maturing with more sectors opening up to it and more job seekers shedding their inhibitions about the nature of temp jobs," says Vinay Grover, CEO, Symbiosis Management Consultants. Globally, temp employees are valued on a par with the mainstream workforce. They've been treated as "springboards" in good times and "shock absorbers" in bad times in India. "This outlook has been changing rapidly in the past three quarters," says Ashok Reddy, managing director of TeamLease.

NOTHING IS PERMANENT

Largely, temp talent paid on a par with permanent employees Given provident fund, gratuity, etc Normal temp tenure between 6 months and 9 months, but extendable Assignments include sales, marketing, accounts, HR, administration, customer support, hardware support and software development * Temp workforce around 100 million of which around 10% in organized sector BFSI, telecom, retail, FMCG and hospitality hire temps in large volumes.

July, 2012: IT industry is expected to slowdown in coming months as its revenue came down. According to the IT industry analysers, due to the shortage of projects from the USA and Europe most of software engineers sit without any work from more than six months. Due to this new recruitment is expected to dip in the coming months.Few IT companies have decided to sent thousands of their employees to training program for which salary shall not be paid.

A software engineer working on a telecom project of a Bangalore-based Tier-I IT major said some of his peers on bench were being pressured to quit.

India accounts for half of global IT-BPO outsourcing

2012, NEW DELHI: India is the global leader in the outsourcing industry with half of the world's back office being located here. Indian outsourcing revenue at $59 billion for 2011, accounts for 51% of the global offshore market share, says a report from Tholons Research, a Bangalore based advisory firm.

The report further notes that over the past decade, developing economies such as India and the Philippines have propelled themselves to become leaders in the global outsourcing industry - making them the top two countries in terms of global offshore revenue share and employment. The total direct employment by Indian IT-BPO sector (as of 2011) was 1.98 million and indirect employment was 7.5 million.

Similarly for Philippines, where total outsourcing revenue was $11 billion in 2011, direct IT-BPO employment was 640,000 and indirect at 1.3 million. Philippines has gained a lot in recent years as lot of voice work (call center type of work) has shifted from India to Philippines.

Cloud computing to create 2 million jobs in India by 2015, says study

Cloud computing will generate some 14 million new jobs worldwide by 2015, and India alone will create over 2 million, predicts a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC).

Pointing out to a strong linkage between cloud, innovation and entrepreneurship, the study said most companies look at migration to cloud computing as a way to free up existing resources and work on more innovative projects. Freeing up budget allows organisations to shift some of their legacy work to the cloud and invest such freed budget in IT innovation that supports business innovation and in turn create new jobs.

"A common misconception is cloud computing is a job eliminator, but in truth it will be a job creator - a major one," said John F Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice-president at IDC in a statement.

The Microsoft-IDC study estimates that the revenues from cloud innovation could reach as high as $1.1 trillion a year by 2015 from $400 billion in 2011, where some $28 billion was spent worldwide on public cloud IT services (as compared to over $1.7 trillion of spending on total IT products and services industry) creating 1.5 million jobs.

The study predicts over two million jobs each to be generated in the communications and media and manufacturing sectors, followed by banking at over 1.4 million. Though there is no such break-up available for the Indian market, the footprint is expected to be more or less similar to global markets, said Ramkumar Pichai, general manager, customer and partner experience, Microsoft India.

Microsoft, Amazon among top recruiters in IIM-C laterals

Feb, 2012. NEW DELHI: Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C) has received a total of 116 job offers from 54 companies during the lateral placement process at the campus, a placement coordinator from IIM-C, who did not wish to be named, told .

This includes five international offers from IT services giant Infosys. The institute has received about 100 pre-placement offers (PPOs) so far, taking the total number of students placed to 210 plus.

Software and Internet technologies company Microsoft has made the largest number of offers to candidates at IIM-C. The company has recruited nine people, across three different profiles- Microsoft IT, India Development Centre ( IDC) and Microsoft Finance.

Internet companies like Snapdeal.com, Zynga, Flipkart.com and Amazon have also recruited candidates in large numbers, the placement coordinator said. The institute, however, did not reveal specific number of candidates hired by these companies.

Amazon offered 10 profiles at IIM-C, which includes job profiles such as business development manager and operations manager. However, not all profiles were taken and the final number of candidates hired was less than 10.

Google, too, has hired across different profiles like industry manager, account manager and account strategist from IIM-C this year. The international positions offered by Infosys are for its client-servicing group. All these candidates will be based in the US or London. Other recruiters include GE Capital and Baring Private Equity.

The institute, which begins its final placement process on Monday, has a batch of 355 students this year, compared to about 388 last year. The institute has already received PPOs from firms like McKinsey & Co, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Co and FMCG major Hindustan Unilever (HUL).

HCL Technologies to create 10,000 jobs in US & Europe over 5 years

Jan, 2012, Indian IT major HCL Technologies on Thursday said the company will create 10,000 local jobs in Europe and the US over the next five years.

Job offers in Indian software industry already top 100,000

Feb, 2012.MUMBAI: The Indian software industry continues to add jobs at a fast clip despite the threat of a slowdown. The industry is estimated to close fiscal 2012 with an addition of around 230,000 jobs.

For FY12, IT industry revenues are set to grow at 16% but the number of people added is likely to grow only by 10%, says the industry body.

Over the last many years, the Indian software companies have also added over 25,000 jobs in the US for local citizens. "The kind of numbers Indian companies are adding is unprecedented. They will have to hire from every part of the world," said Nasscom vice-chairman and TCS CEO N Chandrasekaran.

Over the last 20 years, the Indian IT industry has grown from $ 100 million to $ 100 billion, recording a phenomenal growth. Allocation for IT in India by central and state governments stands at whopping $ 10 billion but so far only $1 billon-$ 1.5 billion has been spent, said Pawar. Nasscom has also submitted a list of recommended procurement processes to the government, so the government projects don't become unviable.