In the recent times, there has been a rising trend of Indian technology workers to get fired from their jobs. Not only men and women with relatively little work experience are becoming victims of this trend but even highly experienced employees who have been working in the IT industry for the last two decades are getting fired from their jobs.
The information technology market in India grew at an astounding speed over the last 20 years, and a bulk of the employees in this industry come from poor and middle-class families. The current trend of job losses, therefore, has most employees in the IT sector worry about the future of their careers.
One of the main reasons for which the Indian it industry overgrew over the last two decades is a practice known as offshoring. This change has made the information technology sector, and all related businesses annually create revenues that exceed the $150 billion mark and offer employment to more than four million people.
The employees build and test different types of software programs, enter and analyze valuable data as well as offer technical support for numerous European and American companies that are always on the look for relatively inexpensive but high-quality labor.
However, there is a new trend that can observe in the worldwide tech industry that relies more and more on robotics, automation, machine learning, big data analytics and machine consulting. These technologies not only threaten to bypass the Indian workers but also replace them in time. Experts believe that automated processes can replace software maintenance work that is usually done by engineering professionals.
These design professionals work with simple codes and analyze different types of data to present software expertise to various foreign clients. However, such manual efforts might soon become unnecessary if the automated processes become commonplace.
While this is not going to incur a lot of financial losses for companies in US and European countries, they can certainly lead to loss of jobs for people in India with limited skill sets. The new trends of technology are also going to increase the number of US jobs onshore. While the extent of damage that will face the Indian IT job market is yet not clear, we assume that by the September of this year, there is going to be a loss of 2% of the total workforce. However, the alarming thing is that this loss of workforce might increase up to 50% to 70% by the year 2020.
While it is true that new forms of technologies are certainly going to create more new jobs, there is certainly going to be a sizeable loss for the IT job market in India. Up until now, it is still not clear as to how the artificial intelligence and automation is going to influence the global and Indian markets.
Some industry insiders believe that although these new technologies are certainly going to create a lot of jobs, many of them will be in countries outside India, such as in the United States where it will be difficult for the average Indians to go and find work. These factors are particularly right with the tighter visa regulations that have been placed by the Donald trump government.
The authorities in the Indian job markets are now reassuring people in this country that the job losses will be only minimal and that only those who fail to perform well will lose their jobs.
However, many of the people who have already lost their jobs seriously doubt that they were under performers and has led to IT employees in India worry about their job security.
