Professional networking company LinkedIn, which now has 50 million members in India, came up with a Workforce Report for India. It mined and analysed data from the members of course, but also one million companies on the platform to report trends around jobs and skills.
The report has two big takeaways.
The report studied 14 cities and found that in seven of them, the Education sector was leading the growth in the first half of 2018. Other industries that grew fast include legal, construction, software & IT services, finance, manufacturing, corporate services, transportation & logistics, recreation & travel and health care. Trailing industries include retail, consumer goods, real estate and entertainment industries. Of the job postings made by companies, those looking for software engineers had the highest share in the first half of 2018, followed by application developers, solutions consultants, Java Software engineers, business analysts. Job posts for software engineers were the highest in eight of the 14 cities. There is a reason for this. Corporates are in the middle of a digital transformation and companies require people with technology skills. IT jobs of a certain kind are growing. Olivier Legrand, managing Director of APAC and Japan at LinkedIn says that even the legal and education sectors are hiring software engineers. While both back-end and front-end jobs are hot in IT, the front-end jobs, such as interface design, require "hybrid skills" or a mix of hard-core programming plus soft skills. Engineers, who can blend this, are in more demand.
A second takeaway is around talent export, counterintuitive in the given market - there is a wave of anti-globalisation across the world, in the United States, in the United Kingdom and rest of Europe. The report, however, draws a different conclusion. "Top draw destinations for professionals in India were the United States, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. In the other direction, migration from the United States, United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom into India were also the highest. In particular, the United States-India corridor witnessed the highest volume of talent migration in both directions in the first half of 2018. However, in-demand talent exchange was greatest between Australia and India," the report says. As a result of cross-border migration of talent, India saw a net outflow of digital skills and a net inflow of skills related to the Oil & Gas industry.
The plausible reason for this export demand is again digital. Countries and companies need to migrate their legacy systems into modern technologies such as cloud and build more attractive front-ends. India has bucket loads of engineers to do the job. Protectionism hasn't impacted that reality just as yet. "But we have to observe it over time," Legrand says.