Indian engineers may not have any jobs in next few years: The motto is re-skill or perish

The job market in India, particularly the Information Technology sector, where job used to overflow is suddenly looking like the gloomy town of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’. If you remember this much acclaimed sci-fi, this movie was based in 2067 and depicts an urban life where the earth has become uninhabitable and students in the schools are encouraged to take agriculture.

Move back to 2017 and the IT industry is already feeling the heat. The IT companies rely more on automation than people. Handling over pink slips to the engineers no longer make people frown because the industry has found a loveable synonym of firing – ‘rightsizing’. And with the Trump government in the USA and stricter immigration rules, the firms there are now more cautious about outsourcing.

If Nasscom report is to be believed, IT industry jobs have grown 5% in the FY 2016-17, however the industry itself grew 8.6%.

"Future opportunities aren't in maintaining computer systems or programming languages,” Vivek Wadhwa, distinguished fellow, Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering, and an industry watcher of several decades told The Economic Times.

"They are in robotic manufacturing plants, analysing massive amounts of data using artificial intelligence, and creating apps that can revolutionise fields such as healthcare, education, and finance. India's out sourcers have struggled to jump on this bandwagon, even though they have seen it approaching for the better part of a decade. Jobs in areas such as testing, system administration and IT infrastructure management are likely to disappear fastest, as automation catches on,” HR consultants told the ET.

"I have been warning Indian IT that it is in trouble, for two years now. The writing is on the wall - the markets and opportunities are changing. The industry needs to reinvent itself and take advantage of advancing technologies. They are shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic,” added Wadhwa.

So what needs to be done?

Well the transformation would be quick and radical. Indian IT professionals have already been warned of the future. What they need to do is to concentrate on re-skilling themselves and acquire new competencies that would be relevant for the automated world. The traditional job of engineer will go paving way for new jobs.