Businesses are exploring ways to strengthen their backend technology infrastructure that is managed in several cases through their captive centres located in countries like India.

The pandemic brought great uncertainty with lockdowns impacting businesses and the economy, which led to job cuts and hiring freezes. Things have been on the mend with hiring resuming. Naukri.com’s JobSpeak Index showed a 5% month on month spike in July 2020. 

In many ways, the pandemic has opened up several new opportunities, especially in India’s technology sector. One of the biggest takeaways for enterprises across the globe has been the huge role of technology in running smooth operations and ensuring business continuity in the face of a global pandemic. Businesses are exploring ways to strengthen their backend technology infrastructure that is managed in several cases through their captive centres located in countries like India.  In turn, global captive centres are hiring to cater to the growing demand. Similarly, Indian IT Services companies are also seeing growth as their clients seek to boost their technology prowess.   

In addition, the pandemic has demonstrated to the world that a large chunk of jobs can be performed remotely. Global companies realize that they can hire people from anywhere across the globe and geographic location is no longer a constraint.   

Given all these factors, we can certainly expect to see new opportunities mushrooming over the next few quarters.   

Developing the Skills to Become Job Ready 

While opportunities will emerge, the question is whether Indian IT professionals and students have the requisite skills to deliver on the opportunities. Constant upskilling and reskilling is important in order to stay current.  

While we see growing adoption of training options such as online courses and certification exams, they have limited effectiveness when it comes to imparting the skills required to deliver on the ground. Most courses follow a fairly passive pedagogy of watching videos online and taking tests to obtain a certificate. As a result, most professionals find that real learning only happens on the job. This creates huge challenges for both the employers as well as the employees. Employers need to defer their growth aspirations without the ready availability of required skills. Not to mention the additional investment of time and resources to train new hires. For employees too, lack of the right skills can impact their attractiveness to employers and their ability to command good salaries.   

Professionals need opportunities to learn through situations that mimic real-world work environments and allow them to solve real-world problems as faced in the industry. This will help to develop the knowledge, skills, and competencies required to innovate and conceptualize broader problems rather than just limiting themselves to the brief.     

The time has come for the tech world to think about providing opportunities for developers to learn contextually using real-world problems optimized for learning. Developers need the opportunity to learn skills practically so that they can come up with an end to end solutions for real-world situations.  

One important avenue for such practical skill-building is for professionals to contribute to open source projects that allow them to develop their skills, build credibility, and showcase their capabilities. Another preferred and effective way would be through learning programs that follow project-based learning pedagogy. In project-based learning, developers get to experience work-like scenarios and learn with a sense of purpose, autonomy, and context. 

We can expect a world of opportunities to open up in the next few months. Setting a good foundation of the right competencies is essential for a developer to leverage those opportunities. With the right skills, only the sky's the limit! 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house