IT companies set to hire record 1.8 lakh employees in 2021

Indian IT services companies are set to witness robust hiring in 2021 as they continue to focus on digital services.

"With the dust about US elections settling, the clients which had put their IT budgets into cold storage are now slowly opening up and renegotiating their projects. All IT companies are back into hiring more people and filling up vacant positions," Aditya Narayan Mishra, CEO of CIEL HR Services told DH.

He said the net addition by IT companies could be in the range of 1.8 lakh this year. Last year, several IT companies had frozen their hiring in view of the Covid-19 pandemic causing huge disruption.

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This year, the additional hiring is likely in the new technology areas of cybersecurity, virtual reality, cloud services, robotics, wireless technologies and 5G, said Rabindra Srikantan, Managing Director, ASM Technologies Ltd.

"The whole world has gone digital after the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. Indian companies are focusing on digital services, cloud technologies. There are huge number of jobs being created even by startups as they are getting massive funding," he said.

The captive centres of foreign companies operating in India are also ramping up in a big way, he said.

"The outlook for CY21 continues to improve, with an increase in deal TCV (total contract value) and pipeline across companies. Managements have further highlighted that clients are rolling out multi-year digital and cloud transformation projects, further improving long-term visibility in this space," Motilal Oswal Financial Services said in a report.

In fact, large IT companies have already made huge strides in hiring in the December quarter. For the quarter ended December 2020, the IT companies added 39,000 employees as against a net decline of 3,000 employees in the past nine months. This came on the back of the highest ever utilisation reported by IT services companies, MOSL data shows.

"The year 2021 will be one of the best years for IT jobs in the last three to four years. Last year was a very bad period. This year, we can see 30-40% jump in hiring over the last year. There are some new trends in hiring. Both the entry and first level supervisory roles are getting created. Secondly, certain technology experts or domain experts with a 10-15-year experience profile are being added," Mishra said.