Capgemini may hire over 20,000 in India

MUMBAI | BENGALURU: Capgemini is expecting to hire over 20,000 people in India this year and has reskilled 45,000 employees until May as it takes strides towards automation. The French IT services consultant had hired 33,000 last year and re-skilled 51,000.

"There is a lot of training. We are investing a lot of money in the development of training programmes because automation and the integration of automation is leading to a lot of opportunity for our workforce," Christopher Stancombe, head, industrialisation and automation, Capgemini, told ET.

The company has about 100,000 people in its India operations. It did not share its global hiring and training figures, citing a silent period before release of quarterly results on July 27.

"We are seeing an increase in demand and automation is helping our people be more productive," said Stancombe.

Most IT companies are hiring fewer people and reskilling staff in adopting automation and digitisation. Nasscom's annual review said jobs grew only by 5% in FY17 and there may be a 20-25% reduction over the next three years.

However, Stancombe said, "We have been more focused on the positive side. We are seeing that it is releasing people's time to enable them to do other things -a bit more analytics, customer care. We are seeing a positive influence and a great opportunity for us, clients and employees. Automation is actually increasing demand for people."

The gap between revenue and job growth is expected to increase, gi ven the commoditised nature of IT services as robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence become a part of the business model.

TCS, India's largest IT firm, said it offered jobs to close to 20,000 this it offered jobs to close to 20,000 this fiscal and has skilled 200,000 employees across 600,000 competencies. The Mumbai-based company had 3,87,223 employees at March end, against 3,53,843 a year ago -a jump of 9.5%.

Bangalore-based Infosys is going to hire 20,000 in India in FY 2018.Total number of employees in Infosys stood at 2,00,364 as of March 31, 2017 versus 1,94,044 a year ago -a mere 3% increase.

In its annual report, Infosys said automation has helped it eliminate around 11,000 full-time employees worth of effort and repurpose those people into more "valuable and rewarding" tasks.