Friday, March 22, 2013

India job market to improve this year





Jobs in India will be back by the end of this year as most global enterprises are likely to resume their expansion activities , after having put them on hold for over a couple of years now , said Pamela Berklich, senior vice president , Kelly Services , a global recruitment process outsourcing services firm.

"India , China and Latin America are high-growth geographies and therefore no global corporate can afford to put their expansion and hiring activities in these geographies on the back burner . Jobs will be back across domains of IT, e-commerce , healthcare , pharma , retail and telecom ," she said . Berklich was speaking on the basis of impressions she had gathered from interactions with large global corporates across industries . She noted that there was also a huge shortage of skilled workforce and tech talent in developed markets .

Globally , IT sector hiring for highly skilled workforce has not come down . Advanced technologies like social , cloud, mobile , big data and analytics are creating huge employment opportunities in India . Telecom, which had seen a big slowdown for a few years , is expected to generate jobs by the end of this year . Almost all global pharma companies are said to be talking about expanding their R&D capabilities .

"Even without any of these arguments , look at the way your country is growing , in the 5% to 6% range . How many other geographies are expanding at this rate ! Most advanced economies are growing at very low single digit rates.The rest of the world is closely reading these big fat growth stories of India, China and Latin America, and they truly want to have a share in it," Berklich said . 

Early this year , Career-Builder , one of the largest online employment websites, surveyed the hiring outlook for 2013 in the ten largest world economies and found that India and Brazil were the most confident , with more than two-thirds of employers in these markets planning to add full-time , permanent headcount . Hiring activity in the BRIC countries (Brazil , Russia , India and China ) was projected to be significantly higher than in other markets . 

Workforce solutions company Manpower's employment outlook survey for India for April-June has been less gung-ho , saying that Indian employers were cautiously optimistic about their hiring plans for the next three months , and job seekers would have to be prepared for a more rigorous selection process . But it noted that in spite of the market downturn and the uncertainty around the economic and political environment , employer hiring intentions remained positive in all seven sectors surveyed .