Employability Mantras For This Decade and Next
World of technology has never seen a pace like the current times. Almost every day, hundreds of companies compete with each other to get customer attention with small improvements to the technology that is already well advanced. Some other keep doing research covertly to disrupt the system with something completely new. The world that saw a rapid technical advancement only during the last great war, the World War 2 seems to have outpaced this speed over last decade.
There is a lot to cheer about it. Such changes bring a lot of new opportunities globally, both to the consumer with new products and to job seekers. However, such changes are known to bring a lot of disruption to many including millions who have invested time and energy to move with the old order and those who suddenly find themselves redundant with a single innovation that wipes away their value in job market.
This pace has been only increasing now. The biggest impact is to the IT industry itself that works overtime to reinvent itself and ends up in huge redundancy with every such innovation cycle. The IT service industry in India seemed the best place for the young generation with great salaries, overseas opportunities and a growth that was envied by every other in the job market. Manufacturing sector in India used to complain that even the non computer engineers are flying off to IT industry leaving them hardly any talent. Needless to say, the IT industry still continues to generate more jobs than any other sector, but it is a retrospection time. New technologies have already started taking toll on the jobs that appeared secured just a couple of years back. It is understood that just in Bangalore itself, 15000 to 25000 jobs have been lost over last two quarters of 2014 and 2015. The way the global customers are negotiating and pitching one against the other, IT companies, who were used to high margins are experiencing the real squeeze. While expenses have gone up, most of the new contracts getting renewed are at lower cost. Many contracts are not even getting renewed putting lots of job at stake.
So what are IT companies doing? They are firing all their cylinders to ride on the new technology bandwagon and showcasing to the customers that they are contemporary and the customers need not look beyond. This is the strategy that typically any company will follow. However the collateral damage to this strategy is the employees who are now high salaried by the virtue of their growth within their organizations for years and are suddenly finding themselves without any value to the market. For most, they are not even trainable nor they are worth for the companies that find taking fresh talent at far lower cost and training them for new technologies.
Under such situation, it is certainly not easy to survive within this ever changing IT world, but those who learn the tricks of the trade, not only survive, but also thrive. My next few blogs will be dedicated to elaborate the ways on how a tech worker can remain valuable and continue to grow without any fear from market change or even their own company getting impacted by such change.
Stay tuned for my next blog.
