India will need nine times as many ‘digitally skilled’ workers by 2025, suggests new report

Digital workers in India: In order to keep up with the scale of technological advancements across all sectors, India would need to have a minimum of nine times the number of digital workers in 2025 than it has currently. These are the findings of a report commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which states that only 12% of India’s total workforce today are digital workers. On the other hand, only 5% of the total workforce in India applies advanced digital skills. However, if only digital workers are looked at, then the report found that 7 out of 10 digital workers in India applied advanced digital skills, which was the highest among the six countries the research studied.

The report also found that in order to keep up with technological advancements, an average Indian worker would need to develop seven new skills by then. Called “Unlocking APAC’s Digital Potential: Changing Digital Skill Needs and Policy Approaches”, the report was based on research conducted by surveying 500 Indian digital workers, along with industry experts, policy makers as well as business leaders. It studied six countries of the APAC region – India, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and South Korea.

It projected that the country would witness an annual growth of 34% between 2020 and 2025 in terms of workers requiring cloud architecture design skills, and stated that this is the highest growth seen across all sectors. Apart from that, workers in the manufacturing sector also believed that they would need to develop cloud architecture design skills by 2025.

It found that a cumulative of 5.7 billion digital skill trainings would be needed across all six countries for the workforce to be upskilled at pace with the advancements in technology. Of these, 3.9 billion digital skill trainings would be needed for India alone, the report said.

Business leaders said that India played a key role as the global exporter of specialised digital expertise. This, they said, meant that workers in India had more specialised skills. On the other hand, high-income countries had either larger technology firms or companies dealing with end users, which would require their workers to have more generic and blanket knowledge rather than specialised expertise.

Another key finding of the report was that digital workers would be needed in order to transform sectors like education and manufacturing, which are essentially non-technology sectors.