Author: BK Vijay
Be it Microsoft or IBM, the automation process in the software business is bringing down thousands of jobs in many countries particularly in India. Engineering graduates getting hired by the big firms is also decreasing every year as most of them are implementing automation platforms to cut costs on productivity, infrastructure and consumption of resources. In the next three to five years, many industrial experts are predicting the shift in demand for engineers from low level coding, testing and back office to highly skilled professionals in the niche areas.
Reasons for Automation
One of the main reasons for implementing automation is to drive higher levels of productivity with fewer revenues. Now-a-days, companies are thinking that it is better to go for one time investment in automating their existing applications rather than hiring more number of employees to develop and maintain these systems. Automation not only reduces the cost but also makes it easy to use, because of which the requirement for qualified engineering graduates to maintain these projects is gradually decreasing. In fact, many firms are employing normal graduates in arts and science to manage these applications, which once were handled by engineering graduates. This shift is clearing showing that the scope of survival for the graduates from normal engineering colleges is very scarce. Either they should hold degrees from top universities or technical institutes or get equipped with extraordinary skills with higher capabilities to handle the technical challenges.
Implication of automation on professional jobs
- Well, many Indian IT giants like TCS, Wipro, Infosys etc have already been working on it for years to develop their own higher level automation systems using artificial intelligence and robotics. All these platforms need very low manual intervention, where work gets done automatically by collecting the data from different systems in an organization. This in fact has led to decline in IT jobs in big organizations but raise in opportunities in startups and midlevel independent firms specifically from those companies that work on automation services.
- With automation process, companies are able to save huge revenues on employee wages and infrastructural cost. The average wage of an IT employee in India has also come down as companies are no more under pressure for paying higher salaries for their employees.
- The technologies that are taught in the colleges are no more in compliance with the industrial requirements. This is leading to more unemployment issues where the demand is only for engineers who can take up high technology challenges as opposed to old traditional employment methods where large numbers of fresh graduates are employed to carry out low level manually repetitive processes.
- One of the most important things to remember is – technology is only replacing the routine jobs but not the ones with complex systems where human intervention and analysis is certainly required. This has even escalated the demand for professionals with higher potential who can easily adapt to the newer technologies and work on multiple platforms.