Fearing Layoffs, Techies In India's IT Capital Go Back To School
41% of Bangalore's IT workers are learning new skills Techies are signing up for online courses to prepare for future jobs Mid-level IT employees were most pro-active in reskilling themselves
As businesses across the world implement automation and digitization to drive greater efficiency, IT sector professionals fear the recent advances in technology may make their roles obsolete. To stay relevant, more and more techies are signing up for online certifications on new technologies and programming languages. A survey of 7,000 IT employees by Simplilearn, an online education portal, revealed that over 50 per cent of IT professionals with work experience of 4–10 years have invested in courses and training programs to help them build new skills.
As reports of job cuts in the IT industry cause anxiety among working professionals and job seekers, Bangalore, India’s IT hub has led other major cities in numbers of people reskilling themselves. According to the survey, 41 per cent of Bangalore’s IT professionals were working on acquiring on new skills in 2017, ahead of Delhi-NCR which came in at 25 per cent and Mumbai at 19 per cent.
