IT firms seek talent with strong foundation as they move to smaller town

The $227 billion Indian IT-BPM industry is looking at every possible way to increase its reach and get access to talent as demand from clients hits new highs. One of the most sought after strategy is expansion into tier-2 and 3 cities. With every company drawing up plans to increase its presence in smaller cities, industry players and experts are asking whether smaller cities have the requisite skill base.

The IT-BPM industry is expected to continue growing at 15 per cent for the next two years, and would need to add one million new recruits. And the demand is for skills that can address new technology demands such as AI/ML, data analytics, cloud etc, which may not be easily available in these cities.

“Businesses are on the lookout for people who can meet the industry's present and future skill demands. So it is critical for future talent to consider developing core skills such as Java, C++, etc, which will open the door to new job prospects,” said Kirti Seth, CEO, sector skill council, Nasscom.

She added, “The relevance of essential technical abilities remains critical, and foundation skills are the most popular. While technology evolves, a solid foundation makes it easier to adapt to and understand emerging technologies.”

Industry experts said foundational skills would remain crucial for business requirements despite the rise of low-code development platforms. Experts point out that for any tech innovation or product coding is the base. According to the Digital Skills Global study, programming and web and application development skills are regularly listed among the top 10 most in demand by employers on LinkedIn.

More importantly, coding is extremely crucial for technologies such as AR/VR. Siva Prasad Nanduri, Chief Business Officer at TeamLease Digital, a human resource services company, said, “Logical reasoning and problem-solving skills will help programmers exhibit higher coding efficiency and we see this focus coming especially when hiring freshers and mid-level Software engineers.”

Nanduri said most large firms have set up offices in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and regularly conduct job fairs and off-campus drives. “We expect the digital skills talent market to reach 75,000-100,000 in tier-2 and 3 cities,” he added.

It's easier to upskill those with a strong foundation or a grasp of the basics. Nanduri said core skills will help engineers upgrade to the new technology stack for jobs like DevOps, Data Science, Scripting, and UI/UX engineer.

“The ‘no-code development’ helps in hiring people, but those with foundational skills will be handy when a business requirement emerges. They will help in complicated applications development and integration,” Seth added.

Mapping talent in smaller cities important

Thiruvananthapuram, Ahmedabad, Cochin, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Indore, Mysore, Vadodara, Madurai, Visakhapatnam, Jaipur, Bhubaneshwar, Mangalore, Lucknow, Nagpur, Goa, Salem, Durgapur, Vijayawada and Trichy are the 20 locations that contribute over 85 per cent of the talent from emerging locations across India.

AI, Big Data, Cybersecurity and Cloud Computing are almost table stakes. However, all these skills need a strong foundation in programming, problem solving and logical reasoning.  With technology changes happening so fast, learning agility is the key. And to learn quickly, foundation skills must be strong.

Seth added the amount of time, money, and effort required in tier-2 and tier 3 markets is immense, as it needs an expansion of recruitment networks that goes much beyond traditional hubs, and the additional factor of mapping available talent to their location of choice.

Hence, a Waltz needs to take place between industry and academia. While academia focuses on strong fundamentals and foundation skills, industry can focus on upskilling a talent pool that has the capability to learn and grow. “Increasingly, the focus is on what you can do, a skill, vs what you know, theory. Skill maps are going to become more and more mainstream as technology diversity grows,” added Seth.

Senthil Kumar, founder, and CEO of CultureMonkey, a full-stack employee engagement platform, said the need for foundational skills depends upon the scale of the business and traffic on the applications. “If you take the case of companies with high traffic, in larger firms, the foundational skills are very important.”

However, the start-ups, which need to implement the features in prototype quickly, would prefer a no-code framework, as it’s easy to deploy, Kumar said.

Vivek Gupta, CEO of staffing and digital transformation company Mastech Digital, said the company was looking forward to expanding in smaller Indian cities. “Tier-1 cities are fairly saturated. It’s much more difficult to retain people there and attrition levels can be very high.” Gupta said.

“The market has been extremely hot from a talent point of view, demand is far more than supply,” Gupta said retention had been a major issue for a lot of companies, but the situation could relax as the widely anticipated economic downturn takes over the global market.