Learn or leave — tech majors are either reskilling employees or slashing jobs

• Cognizant is planning to reskill and redeploy roughly 5,000 senior level employees as a part of its structural rejig.
  
• Capgemini has reskilled over 51,000 people in 2019 so far in technologies like cloud, devOps, and big data.
  
• Technology majors believe that they can improve their margins if their workforce is well-versed emerging technologies.

Amidst the prevailing economic downturn, job losses and reassignments have become common. But a few companies are also taking up large-scale projects to impart skills to their employees. Technology majors believe that they can improve their margins if their workforce is well-versed emerging technologies.

With technologies like AI and machine learning taking center stage, most of these companies are having to change the ‘job roles’ of their employees too. To facilitate this, two multinationals with heavy presence in India — Capgemini and Cognizant — are taking steps to re-skill over 60,000 employees.

Last month, Cognizant said that is planning to reskill and redeploy its senior level employees as a part of its structural rejig. “The gross reduction is expected to lead to a net reduction of approximately 5,000 to 7,000 roles as the company aims to reskill and redeploy approximately 5,000 of the total associates impacted,” $4Karen McLoughlin, CFO, Cognizant in its latest earnings call.

And it is not just engineers that they want to be well-versed in technologies. It is also hiring 500 sales professionals skilled in digital technologies. As of June, the technology major had 288,200 employees — and over half of them are in India.

Capgemini too said that it reskilled over 51,000 of its employees in 2019 so far. They are skilled in emerging technologies like cloud, devOps, and big data. Last year, it upskilled over 60,000 employees through its ‘Automation Drive Academy.’ The initiative helps the company identify opportunities in the automation space.

The cloud of this silver lining is that neither of these tech majors are reskilling ‘all’ its employees. As companies are restructuring, these upskilling projects run parallel to job losses. Capgemini has already started laying off 500 people in India to improve productivity. In Cognizant too, as many as 7,000 mid and senior level jobs are on the line — accounting for 2% of its workforce.

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