With half of its population under 25 and the unemployment rate at four-decade high, India faces an uncertain future. The question on young people’s minds: what kinds of jobs will we have? Quartz asked leaders across India’s biggest industries about that one job in their company or field that will be the most crucial in the coming decades.
Job cuts have become the new normal in the Indian tech industry. From Paytm to Ola, and Cognizant to Infosys, startups and industry giants alike have been laying off staff in the past year. Despite the churn, the startup sector is poised to create 125,000 direct jobs and 400,000 indirect jobs by 2025. The net impact of automation on jobs is unclear. While the Indian staffing federation expects 3 million jobs to be added around AI, machine learning, IoT, data science, analytics, big data, blockchain, and augmented reality, experts estimate only 10 new jobs for every 100 labor-intensive roles that AI replaces.
Hitesh Oberoi, managing director and chief executive officer of online classifieds company Info Edge, told Quartz:
Data scientists and data engineers are the two jobs that come to mind. A company like ours is sitting on tons of data—and it is growing by the day. You can draw a lot of insight from the quality of data we have.
We have 60 million resumes on Naukri and half a million jobs. How do you match jobs and resumes? Two people with similar profiles often prefer different jobs. So how do we cater to them better? The answer lies in the data. Also, Amazon wants different types of java developers from Infosys. So the candidates we should be showing Infosys are very different from the candidates we should show Amazon. All that is there is data. Now we have to figure out how to use this data to improve the user experience for job seekers and recruiters. Ditto for matching in Jeevansathi.com [a website for arranged marriages] as well. We plan to keep investing in data scientists and engineers for a long time.
Hitesh Oberoi is a Quartz Pro, where he joins other top business thinkers and doers who regularly contribute insights on the news as part of the growing membership community. To read more of his contributions and thoughts, download the Quartz app.