Whenever we talk about the IT sector in India, the only things that we visualize are massive buildings, cool workplaces, flexible work hours, and other fascinations. But what we fail to notice is the seeping in of stagnation, or rather a turbulence, over time.
2017 was predicted to be sluggish in terms of job roles, appraisals and hiring and it appears that the predictions are turning out to be true. With the recent news on Cognizant planning to fire 6000 employees and Infosys ‘releasing’ 9000 employees earlier this year, IT in India is not at its glorious phase.
In addition to these alarming facts, officials at NASSCOM (the National Association of Software and Services Companies) have also affirmed that hiring in IT industry will be slow this year. While automation has been called out for massive layoffs and job-role shifts across the IT sector, the real reason is the huge gap between the evolving technologies and the skillsets required to harness them.
India is known for its excellence in QA and testing. But, what’s happening now is that these job roles are no longer the in-demand skills. NASSCOM also reports that the job roles of that of low-skilled employees will become obsolete as more companies and market players switch to automation.
For instance, Capgemeni now uses Watson for project management purposes and Infosys is also reported to work on building a machine-learning tool that will help gauge the requirement of volume of workforce for a project and the timeline for its completion.
As more companies switch to automation and machine learning, the volume of the skillsets required to fill the gap increases dramatically, resulting in massive layoffs of skills that fail to adapt to the emerging technologies.
The Antidote
To cope up with the turbulence in the industry now, perhaps the only solution people in the IT sector can use is reskilling and upskilling to emerging technologies such as machine learning and data science. Viswam Vemula, an IT industry veteran, says that the decision of IT companies to switch to automation and more extensive ecosystems will continue to make hiring processes in IT gloomy. The companies will do away with low-skilled workforce and continue to invest on niche skillsets such as data scientists and machine learning specialists.
In addition to that, the Harvard Business Review has also called ‘the data scientist’ as the sexiest job of the 21st century. With an estimated requirement of 190,000 data scientists in the US alone, this segment of IT is estimated to grow rapidly in the next five years.
To address the growing demand for data scientists and help troubled workforces upskill, Jigsaw Academy, one of India’s pioneers in online analytics and Big Data training, has launched the Integrated Program in Data Science and Machine Learning in collaboration with the University of Chicago Graham School, one of the top 10 institutes in the world.
The course is designed keeping in mind the global need for upskilling and to bridge the requirement of skilled pool of data scientists. Jointly pioneered by the University of Chicago Graham School and Jigsaw Academy, the course features:
- Comprehensive curriculum designed by UC academicians and analytics experts from India
- International lectures from the University of Chicago
- Access to Jigsaw Academy’s cloud lab
- Certificate in Analytics from the University of Chicago and Jigsaw Academy
Besides, students enrolling to the course will also have access to the University of Chicago alumni network and the opportunity to visit the university as part of the study tour.
Coming to the course curriculum, it covers essentials of data science and machine learning, data science and visualization, R for Data Science, data mining, data analysis for evidence-based decision making, industry applications, Big Data analytics with Spark and more.
It also includes capstone projects and assignments, where students, after the completion of the course, will be able to understand the length and breadth of analytics, understand and correlate data science problem statements with business requirements, design data science solutions, know the application of project management skills to data science and use globally used data science tools.
The University of Chicago has always been home to innovation and by collaborating with Jigsaw for a Big Data analytics course, the focus is primarily on bringing latest advancements in analytics and help professionals grow in their careers. With programs like this, India can move beyond a hub for outsourced projects and become a preferred destination for all things data.
Click here to learn more about the program. For further details, call on +91 90199 87000 or drop a mail to idm@jigsawacademy.com.
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