The rise of automation isn’t all doom and gloom for Indian IT.
Even as traditional IT jobs, such as data entry and server maintenance, are expected to decline over the next five years, new-age jobs are emerging, according to a report by Simplilearn, an online professional skilling platform with head offices in San Francisco, USA and Bengaluru. New career paths for India’s IT workforce will open up in digital domains such as big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and cybersecurity, the company said in a press release on August 1. Simplilearn surveyed 7,000 IT professionals, and mined job portals such as LinkedIn and Naukri.com for its assessment.
Here are the roles that are likely to have the most vacancies in the next few years:
But just because there are tens of thousands of openings for a web services consultant doesn’t necessarily make it the most lucrative option. For instance, big data architect openings are far fewer in number but pay much more, according to the report. While a web services consultant position offers a median salary of Rs 9.27 lakh ($14,461) annually, a big data architect could rake in Rs 20.67 lakh ($32,234).
With technology evolving fast, it’s become all the more important for techies to keep their skills up to date with short learning programmes, according to Kashyap Dalal, the chief business officer of Simplilearn.
“It is more a cultural shift people will need to go through,” he said. “They need to get used to the fact that every year, they’ll have to learn something. Everybody will need to make some time, and companies will need to facilitate it, too.”
The urgency to re-skill or perish is especially striking people with mid-level experience: Nearly 57% of the 7,000 IT professionals looking to level up on Simplilearn had four to 10 years of work experience, the company’s report said. Meanwhile, only 11% of those with under four years of experience were seeking the online courses. This could be because early-stage employees, that is, fresh college graduates, often receive in-house training at their respective companies, Dalal suggested, so they don’t have to seek out their own resources, unlike their more experienced counterparts.
Around 41% of those looking to skill up on Simplilearn were from India’s IT capital Bengaluru, which is home to the most tech professionals, Dalal said, besides startups and older IT establishments such as Infosys and Wipro. The Delhi-National Capital Region which is now India’s hottest startup destination, followed with 25%.
This article first appeared on Quartz.