New age industries redefine employee-employer relationship

New-age industries have been setting a trend in employment as well as in the progression of careers.

The typical pattern nowadays is to not stick to a particular company, but acquire skills and experience and keep moving on to different jobs. Therefore, the major factor influencing employee loyalty to a company is missing in the new-age service industry, including the IT industry, while making the individual a free person to think of his career or job.

The earlier practice of seeking a job and aspiring for security in that job for wages as well as perpetuity is a lost cause, and may not be relevant any more. In addition, the sensitivity towards an employee has grown significantly and no more are people treated as labour, thus reducing the criticality of labour protectionism as a welfare act. Today’s workers are aware of their rights and duties, and career progression is pursued by them independently through different means of change in jobs, upskilling and changes in career paths itself.

The collective bargaining model, which was available to the legacy industries, and which was rampantly used wherever there was a great amount of grievance among employees may not be an apt model for new-age industries. This sort of a model can have many disadvantages for the employee; for the simple reason that employer references and the quality of experience comes from the person, etc. The first disadvantage is of losing credentials or references.

Today, an employer doesn’t mean the management team alone, as in earlier times. Today, your manager can be your future employer too, when he moves out of his current position. Your colleague, who can be a superior or a peer, also plays a vital role in providing references – formal or informal for you. Therefore, behavioural trends of people are bound to lean towards being more accommodative and not merely confrontational.
So, the confrontationist attitude, which is typically associated with collective bargaining, is not a very feasible behavioural trait, neither forthe future employer himself nor tothe manager who is part of such an ecosystem of employment. Therefore, the risk that can typically be taken during the process of collective bargaining of proposing to an employer through a union is not something that is possibly happening with the new-age industries such as the IT sector.

However, it is also true that the medium with which they actually interact has also significantly changed, with the advent of social media and the information overload. So, the way people interact and group together has completely shifted from traditional unionist methods. Including this, the right and the duty of an individual is something which has been evolving for the last 20 years as the new-age industry has shaped up.

The awareness of rights and duties of an employee and his future employer is something which is inevitable now. Therefore such an industry never warranted a method such as a collective bargaining system owing to the abundance of jobs and the ability to switch employment. There is no apparent change in this trend, except the extent of security of employment creeping in more frequently than it was possibly about three or four years ago owing to some stagnation.  This phase appears to be a temporary one and answers to such challenges lie in one main objective of reskilling or upskilling. While India is looking at an accelerated economic growth, job growth can not be sluggish and will revive. 

Going through a process of reskilling or upskilling by the employee for better prospects is major driver in career progression today. Especially in the new-age industries, upskilling is a trend. In upskilling, it is not that they completely move away from their core job to learn new skills, but they try and enhance the skills alongwith their work and try to keep up with a few aspects of different or new technology making the person better employable.

The future would follow the global trend in making a person opt for career changes based on not just his/her financial needs or social security, but more on skills, age, temperament and where he/she wants to be. The opportunity is wide open.

(The writer is Chief Executive Officer of Ascent HR)