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 labour-intensive roles that AI replaces.
Rishad Premji, the chairman of IT company Wipro, told Quartz:
We are seeing a robust uptick in demand in areas such as AI, machine learning, data sciences, and strategic design, but these skills do not exist at scale today. Fulfilling this demand will require retraining/re-skilling people at scale.