Techies upskill to troubleshoot Covid-19 slump

HYDERABAD:  Hyderabad’s IT sector was one of the worst-hit last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and therefore, many employees were deprived of an increment in 2020. With appraisal and hiring season again around the corner, techies are hoping that they will get a salary hike this time as many of them spent their 2020 upskilling by taking up additional courses.  

After a rigourous year, Anveesh Reddy Vanga, a software engineer from Wipro, is confident his company will reward him suitably in this appraisal cycle. And why not, Vanga used the extra time he had last year to learn new skills such as Unity3d, Tableau, Business Analytics, Devops and Java Full-stack. “I am sure my organisation will appreciate the effort that I have taken to upskill myself and the value it brings to my team and will offer me a suitable hike this year,” said Vanga.

Aparna Aluri, another software engineer at a city-based software firm, received a 10 per cent hike during the pandemic after she was able to meet the company’s sales target. “Working from home gave me time to dedicate to self-learning and take up the Post Graduate Program in Business Analytics with Great Learning. 

This upskilling helped me take up a new challenging role as a learning analytics team leader. I got a 10 per cent salary hike as the company could hit the learning sales target,” Aluri said. Hari Krishnan Nair, co-founder of Hyderabad-based Great Learning, said, “Despite the slump in the job market, the enthusiasm and optimism around the digital functions like Data Science, Analytics, AIML, Cloud Computing, and Cyber Security remained high in India in 2020. The industry witnessed a surge in demand for skilled technology professionals in these domains, especially in the IT & BFSI sectors leading to decent hiring activity. When it comes to our students, not only did we witness several career transitions, but some of our learners were able to bag salary hikes as high as 90 per cent.”