A report on the hiring trends in BPM (business process management) and startups sector has revealed that the demand for digitally skilled professionals, at the current trajectory, will rise to 2.7 million, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% between FY 2019-2023. Thus, to stay ahead of the curve, it is imperative to acknowledge the importance of skilling/ up-skilling/ re-skilling in skillsets required to perform new job roles. The study was conducted by industry body NASSCOM and Aspiring Minds, which is into pre-employment and workforce assessments using artificial intelligence (AI), psychometrics, machine-learning and statistics.
Underscoring the increasing importance of communication skills in technical roles, IT employers are now hiring tech professionals who can communicate effectively with both internal and external stakeholders. 20% of the recruiters feel that basic communication skills have become a make or break decision for them in hiring the perfect candidate.
The report says that even though companies are implementing programs to upskill their workers, the main challenge faced by the workers is their inability to grow and adapt to a new skill set. Therefore, the employers are seeking candidates who can demonstrate complex problem-solving and learnability skills, more than their in-depth technical knowledge.
The report says there has been a shift in the recruitment exercise from theory to practical implementation of skills. The companies have now started to adopt online assessments such as coding simulations, which can replicate live project scenarios to comprehensively evaluate candidates. Coding simulation is a virtual coding environment with complex and challenging real world problems. This enables the recruiter to test the candidate’s practical ability to write code, compile, and test problem cases. In doing so, companies are consciously shifting their approach, by laying greater focus on practical coding skills over theoretical knowledge, to hire the right talent, the report states.
As per Aspiring Minds’ National Employability Report 2019, in India, only 40% of engineering students took internships and 36% took experiential projects outside their assigned coursework, thus indicating that the engineering discipline in India is very theoretical. Thus, the top IT services employers recommend including experiential learning methods such as internships, certifications, MOOCs (massive open online courses), labs, hackathons and live projects, to build practical skills in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) students. 30% of the top IT services companies believe that candidates with additional certificates get better salary.
Around 15-25% of fresh hires are being deployed in emerging technologies job roles like Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, RPA.
The methodology involved interviews with 18 top IT services companies, which constitute more than 50% of the total IT services hiring of STEM graduates. Online surveys and secondary research were also conducted to corroborate the interview findings.