About 94 per cent of the IT graduates are not fit for hiring, says CP Gurnani, the chief executive officer of Tech Mahindra, in an interview to a national daily.
A student scoring 60% marks cannot pursue BA (English today) but can definitely go in for engineering, he elaborated. “My point is simple – are we not creating people for unemployment? The Indian IT industry wants skills. For example, Nasscom says 6 million people are required in cybersecurity by 2022. But we have a skills shortage. The point is if I am looking for a robotics person and instead I get a mainframe person, then it creates a skill gap. This comes as a big challenge,” he told the newspaper.
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The biggest challenge for the IT companies like Tech Mahindra is skilling of manpower and logging into new-age technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cyber-security and machine learning.
The company has created a five-acre tech and learning centre to skill employees as have other companies. The onus of skill development work readiness for the market, is now shifting to the industry. The top 10 IT companies take only 6% of the engineering graduates. “What happens to the remaining 94%?” he asks.
Earlier for every million dollars of revenue, 20 people were hired. This has changed. Now 15 people are hired because productivity and automation has increased. You need 25% lesser people.