Talking Point: Capgemini India chief says 65% of IT employees not retrainable

“I am not very pessimistic, but it is a challenging task and I tend to believe that 60-65 per cent of them are just not trainable,” Capgemini India’s chief executive Srinivas Kandula said. 

The domestic arm of the French IT major employs nearly one lakh engineers in the country. “A large number of them cannot be trained. Probably, India will witness the largest unemployment in the middle level to senior level,” he said at the annual Nasscom leadership summit.

Flagging concerns surrounding the quality of IT workforce, he said much of the 3.9 million IT employees come from low-grade engineering colleges which do not follow rigorous grading patterns for students in their zeal to maintain good records. 

His remarks come days after the industry lobby Nasscom said there is a need to re-train up to 1.5 million, or nearly half of its sectoral workforce. This is primarily on the back of a change in nature of work in newer, digital technologies.

Kandula said the industry, driven by yield-seeking investors, has not invested enough to upgrade the skill-sets of its employees. More number of students are now being hired from lower grade engineering colleges, which has ensured that the rise in wages has been negative by a huge margin.

Kandula said as against offers of Rs 2.25 lakh per annum that used to go out for freshers two decades ago, they have risen only to Rs 3.5 lakh now, which suggests a massive decrease in real wages from an inflation-adjusted perspective. 

“For some unknown reasons, we call it a knowledge-driven industry. If you have that kind of talent, and then making them learn the existing technology itself is such a huge challenge,” he said, lamenting about the dip in quality of students.

A recent study showed as much as 80 per cent of engineering graduates are unemployable. Last week, Kandula said his company would shift focus to hiring freshers from the laterals earlier due to the newer skill-sets required and the ease of training which the freshers offer. He, however, had maintained that they will continue to hire.