IT hiring gets a fillip: Software companies bullish on employment prospects, to scale up recruitment by March 2019

It looks like it is a good time again for the Information Technology sector in India. Companies are hiring more in 2018, so far and this trend could continue till 2019, according to a survey that covered approximately 550 IT employers across India. Until now, with automation and Artificial Intelligence taking over routine jobs, and also some niche jobs in the IT sector, the threat of job losses loomed large. A Nasscom report stated that over 260 million are likely to lose jobs to automation by 2020, if they are not skilled in emerging tech skills. This, linked to the H-1B visa rule change by US President Donald Trump hit the sector hard. However, the good news is that IT firms have begun to hire in large numbers due to the creation of new jobs. According to the Experis IT Employment Outlook Survey, which covered around 550 IT employers across India, IT firms have indicated higher hiring for the next two quarters compared with the previous two, a report in The Economic Times said. “IT hiring in India has been sluggish in the last two quarters. However, jobs are being created and IT hiring will pick up slowly in the coming months and see an upside by March 2019. Non-IT companies will be the big players in IT hiring as more and more companies establish their captive centres in India,” said Manmeet Singh, president of Experis, a ManpowerGroup India company. [caption id=“attachment_1128317” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representative image. Reuters[/caption] The non-IT companies are building teams for digital transformation, the survey revealed. Non-IT companies across sectors sum up a hiring outlook of 45 percent. The survey reported a positive net employment outlook of 53 percent for the period between October 2018 and March 2019. According to the survey, the big players, especially the software and quality assurance testing companies, will continue to be more bullish on their employment prospects. Software companies with over 250 employees intend to hire more employees than hardware companies or startups. This will be ruled mainly by on-demand hiring, the ET report said. Firms in the utilities, finance, manufacturing and retail sectors are expected to see strong hiring activities. Experis said that the hiring of IT experts is likely to be higher in the non-IT domains because of automation. Recently, a number of firms said they were planning to hire more in the current fiscal. HCL Technologies, India’s fourth largest IT services firm, is planning to hire 25,000-30,000 people this year as it sees more customers outsource technology work and deliver services, an ET report said. The focus is on hiring full stack engineers, the company’s chief human resources officer, Apparao VV said. According to a report by professional networking firm LinkedIn, technology-related roles are in high demand. The first India edition of this report that traced the career graphs of professionals in the top five roles to get a sense of how it has progressed over the past five years found the following were in demand –  Machine learning engineer, application development analyst,  back end developer,  full stack engineer, data scientist, customer success manager,  digital marketing specialist, big data developer,  sales recruiter, and python developer. A number of companies have disclosed their expansion plans. Post-Walmart’s acquisition of home-grown player Flipkart, the US retail giant said it would hire around 1,000 people for Paypal is planning to hire 600 techies by the end-2018 while Uber said it was planning to expand its tech team in India, according to media reports. With agency inputs