Where does Indian IT sector see itself in next 10 years ?
and where will you fit ?
It wasn’t long back when IT in India was regarded as a stable and lifelong career track with potential scope of unlimited growth opportunities. But a recent string of events and upcoming future technologies have changed the very core ideas of IT landscape in India. Be it the change in the political domain like we have recently seen in the month of April this year with the executive order of President Donald Trump or the current and upcoming turmoil caused by the disruptive Artificial Intelligence and Automation technologies.Indian IT industry is on the verge of a landscape shift from which only way to survive and prosper is to take the route of innovation and disruption. The old model of cost arbitrage needs to be changed and the target should be to become disruptive technology provider who provides proactive solutions and products instead of the reactive.
Considering the shift that automation and artificial intelligence bring with itself let’s talk about what AI and automation uphold for the future of IT.
Vishal Sikka, ex-CEO of Infosys, said in March of this year
If we sit still, there is absolutely no doubt that our jobs are going to be wiped out by AI. Sixty to 70 percent over the next 10 years or maybe less than 10 years of the jobs that we do today are going to be replaced by AI…unless we continue to evolve ourselves.
It’s estimated that by 2021 an uphold of 640,000 low skilled Jobs will be lost to AI and Automation. In Indian IT sector most of the low skilled jobs which will be lost will be that of software maintenance and monitoring jobs which unfortunately much of the larger workforce in IT is deployed into. On a more positive note Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS (Amazon Web Services), said,
Clearly, there is an opportunity and it is unfair to say AI will take away jobs. I am so glad that these repetitive tasks that we call jobs will go away. Humans can now do things that they are always meant to do, which is to learn and do higher work.
Predictive monitoring systems for IT infrastructure, automatic deployments systems and automatic code review and coding systems are being tested and researched upon by various organizations and this will lead to a large number of the workforce being replaced by these systems.
The future of IT will be a lot more focused on the innovative roles which add to the value of businesses rather than the low skilled work which most of the workforce is used to currently. A lot of these roles like data scientist have already started to make their mark in IT industry, and as the time passes these will only become more prominent than ever before.A lot of Indian IT organizations have already asked most of the workforce to focus on reskilling and learning the new technologies to better prepare them for the uncertainty that looms over the industry in future.
What this means for Indian IT professionals is to transform their conventional IT roles into the roles of the future. Currently, most prominent of them are
1. Data Scientist
2. Data Analyst
3. Data Engineers
For the first two roles, a person needs to have strong analytical skills and have to be good with probability and statistics. For the latter, one should be strong in networking and administration skills with a better grip on data management and storage to improve the efficiency of the large-scale systems.
Conclusively, every professional in today’s IT industry should have a check of what he/she can do to enhance their expertise portfolio so as to maintain their relevance in the workforce of the future Indian IT industry.
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