Is IT Sector Back On Track?

It was only a few years back that Indian IT industry was singing a dirge at the low note, irregular hiring patterns and reneging job offers made at engineering campuses. But within a short time span, the sector regained its long-lost charisma and is back at accelerating the nation’s economy. 

Due to the vibrant new policies and vivid promotion by the government, the positivity around India and its workforce has catapulted enormously. Lot of FDI is coming to India for multiple sectors. And, if the positive balance between the external and internal markets is maintained, the Indian IT sector will soon be shaping the dynamics of global markets in many ways. 

Growth is evident

There existed a time when India’s IT sector was slumping down, and no hope was left to revive it back. But time never remains the same always, and thankfully the continuous innovations and wholehearted dedication of the professionals working in this sector, India’s IT companies are now registering appreciative revenues year-after-year.

Earlier, this year while addressing an event at the Asia House in London, India’s IT and Electronics minister Ravi Shankar Prasad shared the growth in revenue stats of Indian IT companies which have boosted all the way from $129 billion in 2015-16 to $167 billion in 2017-18. He further quoted that Indian IT and BPM sector’s revenue is estimated to reach $350 billion by 2025.

Even in the face of the global slowdown, the sector continued to expand not just within the Indian horizons but was also successful in triggering exports from $107 billion in FY16 to $129 billion in FY18. The sector has received $29.825 billion of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows between April 2000 and December 2017. Considering the brilliant pace of growth, experts have anticipated the export revenue to touch the US $135-137 billion marks in FY19.

Appreciative outsourcing trends

Outsourcing of India’s IT services hold a prominent status and are currently accounting for around 67 percent of the overall outsourcing world. It is the availability of skilled professionals with excellent English fluency and favourable government policies that are the generating international investor’s interest in the nation’s IT environment. 

Moreover, the country is now evolving into a value-added destination wherein the aim is to provide cost-efficient technology and opening up new industry verticals in the field of consulting services, business services, and system integration. While the country’s IT sector, on the one hand, has great MNC giants like Tata Consultancy Services, Infotech, Wipro, Cognizant, and Infosys are leading the industry’s growth. 

The Small and Medium-size (SME) players, on the other hand, are creating rich employment opportunities and focused niche IT segments to facilitate the functioning of MNC’s in the Indian environment. As per the industry reports, Indian IT companies have around 600 offshore development centres located in around 78 countries around the world. 

As the infrastructure quality is improving across the country, the IT companies that were earlier restricted in the geographical boundaries of metropolitan cities are also into expanding their setup to lower-tier cities like Surat, Bhubaneshwar, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Nagpur, Jaipur and many more.    

Transforming for a better future

There are tremendous opportunities waiting to be tapped on by the industry in the near future. In order to leverage these opportunities in favour, the focus needs to be concentrated at disrupting, transforming and reinventing the work scenarios as per the changing technological scenes around the world.

Even the students need to immediately arm themselves up with the skill set that is likely to be the top priorities of the IT industry in the future. The NITI Aayog report titled 'National Strategy for AI' has clearly noted that the recent years of IT sector will open up great career avenues in areas of data annotation, speech transcription and image classification among others.

Other than the employees, both current and would be ones, the transformation in technology also requires close attention from the employers and academic institutions to ensure sustainable development of the Indian IT world. Instead of being extensively knowledge-oriented, the focus needs to be shifted at practical approaches of the respective job profiles. 

There lies an urgent need for the Indian education to be STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math), or computer-based skills oriented as the technology-oriented jobs will gain prominence in the future. But if gone otherwise, the sector will witness extreme downfall and mass employment layoffs due to changing skill set requirements.