What are the new skills in demand? And what is the demand supply equation of candidates with these skills? Belong, an HR tech recruitment startup, has come up with a Talent Supply Index (TSI) (inspired by the Big Mac Index) that measures how competitive the market is for a given job by dividing the total number of people with relevant skills by the total number of opportunities for that job.

According to Rishabh Kaul, co-founder of Belong.co, “This can help companies with their hiring plans.” Companies can decide on whether it will be cheaper to upskill their own talent as against recruiting new talent.

Belong’s TSI shows the demand for IOT skills has grown by 304 per cent and Data Science by 76 per cent over the last three years (2014-17). Companies such as Cisco, IBM, Intel and Qualcomm are among the top employers for IOT talent. While there is enough supply of Java and Python developers, which rank 4.0 and 2.3, there is a shortfall in skills such as cloud computing specialists (0.7) and security engineers (0.4).

How the Index works is if there are 1,000 data scientist opportunities against only 800 available people, the role scores 0.8 on the TSI. The closer the role tends to zero, the more supply-constrained is the market.

Says Kaul, “We see a couple of things happening – both people and companies have now invested in upskilling. While companies are setting up Learning and Development centres on their campuses, individuals are going out of their way, joining Coursera to upskill.”

The other trend Kaul sees is the convergence of job roles across industries. No longer are these skills – AI, IOT, data science – restricted to the IT industry but also wanted in banking, retail, hospitality and so on.

Within companies, Kaul says a lot of thinking is going into hiring people who will grow into these new job roles. For example, a product manager is usually a software engineer who develops a few other skill sets on job and moves into that role. Also, with such acute shortage of supply, there is very high mobility of talent. Compared to Software Architects whose average tenure per company is 5.3 years, data scientists spend less than 1.8 years.

Bangalore is the hotbed for high-value tech talent. It accounts for 40 per cent of India’s data scientists, and yet scores a supply-negative 0.6 for Data Science hiring.

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