What can India's IT sector look forward to in 2022?

The Indian IT sector is at a hiring war, with the attrition rate rising every quarter since last year. Over the last six months, the attrition rate at India’s major tech companies has gone up to touch a range of 20-30% per annum.

Employees are quitting their jobs for better prospects and the phenomenon has come to be known as the ‘Great Resignation’. Companies are paying greater salaries to retain their senior employees in an attempt to cut down the attrition rate.

However, the skill gap still persists. Therefore, the companies are also introducing advanced skill training programmes and upskilling programmes for the employees.

Apart from hiring freshers, there is also an emerging trend of hiring graduates from fields other than software engineering. The hiring war is a result of a mismatch between supply and demand in the tech industry, which will result in certain hiring trends that we may see in 2022.

Here are some hiring trends that will dominate the industry this year:

Continued hybrid work

There has been a drastic change in the work culture ever since the outbreak of the pandemic. With vaccination drives and low cases, there has been a trend where companies are asking employees to work from the office. However, being sensitive to the employees who have been working from home for two years, companies are keeping options open for a hybrid model, without making coming to the office compulsory.

Upskilling through online learning

Due to the existing skill gap in the talent pool and remote working, we will see an uptick in the online upskilling programmes for freshers and experienced employees. According to the report Investing for Impact: Education, Skills and EdTech, “With the pandemic contributing to an unprecedented jump in online education and job upskilling in the country, India will soon become a USD 313 billion online education market.”

Employing more women

Women are treated as a ‘reserve workforce’ rather than an intrinsic part of the economy. Most women take a break after reaching the mid-management level because of marriage, childbirth, caring for ailing parents, and it becomes difficult for them to return to work after the gap in their career because they often end up with a skill gap with this break.

However, it is high time that industries start treating women right by giving them equal pay. Especially when they are better prepared for jobs than men. According to the BTEQ (BridgeLabz tech employability test quotient) survey; aimed to determine the readiness of the engineering talent for development jobs, conducted with more than 20,000 engineering graduates from varied streams across India revealed that the average score of women was 42% as against 39% men.

Tapping tier-2 cities

The industry also needs to take a close look at the talent in tier-2 cities. Talent from lower-tier cities and states have better employability scores than those from metro cities. According to the BTEQ, conducted with more than 20,000 engineering graduates from varied streams across India, there is an improvement in the average score from 27% (2020) to 40% (2021).

The survey indicated that Andhra Pradesh has 41% of ready talent followed by Assam with 32% and Bihar with 31%. The analysis shows that 75% of the talent is from Tier-2 cities.

Utilising lateral talent

Another way companies are addressing the talent crunch is to bring back the older employees with better perks and prospects in the development roles.

Also, there is a huge volume of the workforce who started off as engineering talent but took up non-tech jobs. Many of them want to come back to a tech career and can be groomed to have a great career in tech.

(The author is the founder of a tech hiring platform)