How India can rise to the challenge of developing a winning talent ecosystem

Talent scale, cost, and availability are the hallmarks of India’s technology and business services industry. But can it stay ahead of the game with its current focus on bread-and-butter tech? We surveyed 300 Global 2000 enterprises and 600 India-based IT services employees with the support of Cognizant. The results reveal the current strengths and future challenges facing India’s IT and business services industry.

Our study lays bare the state of employee sentiment and enterprise needs amid continuing talent shortages and rapid changes in the economic and geopolitical context. The key findings describe the industry’s balancing act:

• The balance between the supply and demand of skills is fragile and precarious. Comparing client and employee perspectives provides three distinct views on India’s current skill provision: the Hot Zone, the Goldilocks Zone, and the Cold Zone.
• Two distinct categories of tech skills supply are particularly misaligned. The first category includes high-demand core technology areas, such as cloud and SaaS, where providers struggle to meet an almost insatiable demand for skills. The second includes emerging technology areas, where new business requirements such as 5G capabilities stress existing talent pools.
• India’s service providers disappoint enterprise buyers looking for non-technical business skills. Our research demonstrates that buyers are interested in non-tech business skills, such as people management, problem solving, and collaboration.
• Employees are caught in a supply and demand seesaw. Employees want to develop skills to stay relevant and pursue ambitious career goals. Yet our research reveals that some attrition and perceived satisfaction challenges across the industry are linked to the difficulty employees perceive in pursuing skills and progressing at work.

Failing to align India’s talent pool with changing enterprise demand risks a serious stall to India’s global dominance for technology.

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