High hopes for tech jobs, skills notwithstanding: Study

A study by a major job portal has revealed that technology-related job openings have grown steadily in demand over the last five years, although the study also showed that many of the jobs have become hard to fill.

The job site, Indeed, an American company which bills itself as the world’s largest job portal, said that technology job roles in India increased by an overall 8% between February 2014 and February 2019. From February 2018 to February 2019, such job roles grew by 31%, while job searches for these roles during the same period increased by 8%.

However, Indeed’s data also showed that 30% of jobs requiring technical skills in India had become “hard to fill” - revealing that the rate at which the demand for skilled technology employees is outstripping the rate at which skilled technology talent is available.

This development also appears to indicate that a lack of reskilling is rendering many job seekers outdated as far as current market requirements go. According to a March 2019 report by the International Labour Organisation, a large proportion of businesses in the United States, Brazil, India and Germany reported that they were looking “for quite different skills in new recruits than three years ago.”

In the US, the figure was 61%. In India, however, the figure is 66 per cent. The hardest the fill job was Development Operations Manager, followed by database specialist, senior information technology manager, systems programmer and web administrator.

Over 50% of jobs posted in the sector require applicants to be skilled in Java programming.

“Job profiles are evolving and changing at a pace that can be matched by talent, provided they acquire the requisite skills,” said Sashi Kumar, Managing Director of Indeed India.