Requirement will rise to 2.3-2.7 million digitally-skilled professionals during 2023: Nasscom

IT lobby Nasscom has indicated that the demand for digitally-skilled workforce will rise at 35% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) between FY 2019-2023.

“During financial year 2023, at our current trajectory, the requirement will rise to 2.3-2.7 million digitally-skilled professionals,” said Kirti Seth, Industry Lead, Futureskills, Nasscom, on the sidelines of their annual HR summit in the city.

NASSCOM had also bookmarked skilling as its top priority for the next three years. To do this, the immediate objectives include transforming 100 universities to supply digital talent, upskilling four million professionals by 2025 and driving the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics) transformation and ensuring its implementation across the industry.

“STEAM includes arts – we need to bring in human skills too,” Debjani Ghosh, president, Nasscom, said. Efforts are also being made to build professional skills along with technical skills that are critical, she added.

“If we don’t fix the problem of talent pool immediately, there will be a point where companies are going to start hiring from each other. That’s going to have a big impact on wages and will redefine the competition landscape for companies,” said Ms. Ghosh.

Rising investments

According to Nasscom, the industry is witnessing rising investments towards digital skilling initiatives in technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data science, cybersecurity, cloud, blockchain and several other segments.

The Indian IT-ITeS industry’s digital talent base has been growing in excess of 20% YoY and today, there is an installed talent base of around 2.6 lakh in cloud computing, 1.85 lakh in AI and big data analytics, 1.85 lakh in social media and mobile platforms and 1.7 lakh in IoT.

Ms. Seth said that there were more than 100 universities and firms that have nominated their talent to be reskilled using the Futureskills platform. The platform has over 30 partners developing over 40,000 content pieces and an additional 6,500 content pieces are being curated by domain experts from the industry and academia.

Digital skilling is now being recognised as a KRA (key result area)in business scorecard by few companies in India.