In times of slowdown, won’t there be jobs? There still will be because the relevance of IT and IT-enabled services for efficient solutions to increase productivity will only grow. A cursory survey of the job market in IT and ITES shows the broad contours of the demand for various categories of jobs.

“Courses on advanced algorithms, mathematical models of computation, real time systems, distributed computing are some of our courses that are seeing huge traction,” Prof. Sadagopan of IIIT Bangalore, said.

The global e-commerce firm Amazon has advertised for about 300 jobs in this calendar year for its India operations. Mostly, it is looking for graduates and lateral (people with 2-3 years of experience) for jobs such as finance managers, software development engineers, BPM developers, financial analysts and quality assurance engineers.

How they hire

“For fresh hiring, we hire only circuit branches, i.e., Computer Science and Engineering, Electronics, Electrical, information science technology and MCA. Hiring from certain specific courses is conducted depending upon our project needs for example, we hire mechanical engineers or telecom engineers for our Engineering & Research Services Delivery Unit,” Naveen Narayanan, Global Head, Talent Acquisition of HCL Technologies, said. Currently in India, there are 197 active Cisco Networking Academies across 23 States and Union Territories with 22,379 active students, 31 per cent of which are women students. Overall, these academies have impacted 70,304 students since the inception of this programme in India.

India has 18,738 Cisco Certification Ready Course completions through the Cisco Networking Academies.

“Through the HP Institute, the HP ATA certification delivers the industry’s first architect-level certification designed for academia. Students gain job-ready IT skills that prepare them for employment in small and medium businesses in areas connected devices, networks, servers and storage and cloud computing,” Brian Beneda, Manager of HP Academic Programmes, Global Certification and Learning, HP, said.

Bestseller courses

For the IT industry, bestseller courses are industry certification courses in software development, software testing, networking, analytics, and mobile application development. Companies have raised their selection bar and are recruiting for differentiated skills.

“Though it must be said that IT industry recruiting is still sluggish, at the same time, IT industry’s loss is banking industry’s gain. Banks are recruiting one lakh new employees this year and close to five lakh engineers are applying for those positions. Many of these positions are technical in nature,” Santanu Paul, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of TalentSprint, said. In effect, the engineering talent flow is getting diverted from the technical to the financial sectors. So preparatory courses for bank exams are also in demand, he said.

(With inputs from Venkatesh Ganesh in Bangalore and Ronendra Singh in New Delhi)

>kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in

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