Human Resource Development

Human Resources Development (HRD) is a framework for the expansion of human capital within an organization through the development of both the organization and the individual to achieve performance improvement.

Human Resource Development is the integrated use of training, organization, and career development efforts to improve individual, group and organizational effectiveness. HRD develops the key competencies that enable individuals in organizations to perform current and future jobs through planned learning activities. Groups within organizations use HRD to initiate and manage change. Also, HRD ensures a match between individual and organizational needs.

Skill development is an important aspect for effective negotiation, communication and leadership skills. But today there a huge gap between the skills required for an IT professional and the skills available. The inability to “deep-dive” into a particular language as the experience level increases, inadequate soft skills, inability to deal with the clients and lack of knowledge of the corporate etiquette ranging from emails, reporting, compliance and protocols. When there is such a profound lack of skills amongst the IT professionals is severely affecting the a certain organization, it is essential to rectify this skill gap as soon as possible.

Major Trends Impacting Skill Requirement in the IT Industry

The major trends that would impact the human resource and skill requirements in the IT Industry are outlined below:

Continuing demand for a skilled workforce: The IT industry would continue to grow at healthy growth rates over the next decade leading to a continuing demand for a skilled workforce. This will be lead by demand for engineering graduates as well as an increasing component of Science and graduates from other streams.

Continuing and building upon transformation from IT Services to include IT Consulting: The IT industry and its human resource would need to build consulting capabilities (architecture, application selection, solutioning, process engineering/re-engineering) to help them tap into higher value projects which would have several downstream revenue spin-offs.

Ability to Innovate: IT companies would need to straddle the value-chain right from inventing to innovating to implementing till enhancing.

Increasing play in Migration Projects: While a large proportion of projects would be in the maintenance space, the industry is likely to see an increasing share of projects which would involve migration across systems and platforms. This would be on account of consolidations and Mergers and Acquisitions occurring in several industry sectors globally.

Green IT and Cloud Computing: This could be one more potential area for building scale and innovation going forward. This spans aspects both internal and external to the industry. Adoption by industry of Green technologies and practices including Green buildings, Green computing infrastructure e.g. energy efficient data centers, power efficient computers, sharing infrastructure e.g. shared data centers, addressing issues like e-waste management is a potential growth area. This has also a vast business opportunity in terms of consulting with clients on Green IT.

Increasing share of other business verticals: While the IT industry has been dominated by the BFSI segment, the industry is likely to witness increased share from segments such as Retail, Telecom, Healthcare, Technology, etc.

Increasing play of Infrastructure Management Services: This is likely to be a major growth areas with companies increasingly outsource much of their infrastructure management to Indian IT vendors, including ITIL management, and IT Service Management.

Larger share of newer markets: The industry is likely to see increasing share from continental Europe, Japan, and even continents such as Africa and Latin America.

Increasing play in the Indian market: With increasing propensity of the Government to outsource more of IT (as evidenced by the e-seva facility for passports), this would be a large pie waiting to be tapped. Indian IT professions need to have a domestic market focus – right from pricing to local language skills in order to cater to this demand. Even software programming could witness a larger portion of local languages.

Evolution of newer pricing models: The emergence of newer pricing models such as ‘outcome based pricing’ will demand higher productivity levels from employees. Based on the trends witnessed in productivity and the likely growth potential of the IT and ITES industry, it is expected that the industry would employ about 7.5 million persons directly by 2022.

Therefore the focus areas for skill development should be

  • Logical thinking and problem solving
  • Specific programming languages(demand driven)
  • Project management training i.e estimation review etc.
  • Communication and softskills
  • Teacher training modules for software engineering and programming languages
  • Modularized skill building in these areas is required to ensure constant up gradation of skills in the projected workforce of 7.2 million by 2022. Out of this 70% to 80% would be in the junior and mid-level stream. Building skills in this workforce is critical for the IT industry to maintain its competitive edge and innovate.