India will need 2.7 million digitally-skilled people by 2023 across sectors, not just in IT

• According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), over half (54%) of the Indian employees will need to reskill themselves in the next four years.
  
• Technical skills like Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence are among the most in-demand employability skills.
  
• India has nearly 680,000 digitally skilled professionals, of which 400,000 are employed in the IT industry.

The world is automating and is changing the we work. And more than half of Indian employees have to re-skill themselves to stay relevant.

According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), 54% of the Indian employees will need to reskill themselves to keep up with the growing demand for automation.

In fact, the country will need four times its existing digital workforce, over the next four years to cater to the industry demands, TOI reported citing officials.

Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things(IoT) are in high demand. Apart from digital skills, personality traits like negotiation intelligence, problem solving and assessment are also highly sought after by the recruiters.

In the future, professionals will have to re-skill themselves every 3-4 years, \to evolve in a competitive working environment, ET reported citing Zairus Master, CEO, Shine Learning, a global education services provider.

Given that, the IT industry body plans to associate with 30 universities across the country — including SRM University Chennai — to reskill the workforce. Under its FutureSkills initiative, it targets to re-skill nearly 4 million people by 2025.

As of now, there are 680,000 people with skills in cloud computing, big data and analytics, and artificial intelligence, but 400000 of them are employed in the IT sector. But, as automation invades all sectors, even others will need to upskill themselves to be employable in an increasingly digital future.

The demand will rise to 2.7 million by 2023.

Almost 65% of the jobs in the IT industry will witness transition over the next five years, according to NASSCOM.

The survey comes on the back of another report “The future of women at work: Transitions in the age of automation” by McKinsey Global Institute that said that automation may cost India a major transition in jobs over the next 10 years. It noted that nearly 11 million Indian women in the workforce will need to change their jobs by 2030.

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