Business
Country's largest IT company, Tata Consultancy Services is faced with a difficult challenge in the largest market for IT, the United States.
Updated : Jun 07, 2018, 03:00 AM IST
Country's largest IT company, Tata Consultancy Services is faced with a difficult challenge in the largest market for IT, the United States.
While its President Donald Trump wants more Americans to be employed locally, TCS is increasingly finding it difficult to get the right talent.
And this problem would only get worse in coming days although long term solutions are being worked upon to set this right, says Ajoyendra Mukherjee, Executive Vice President & Global Head-Human Resources, Tata Consultancy Services.
"We would be hiring more locally in US and we are already one of the top recruiters in US. But the problem in hiring in US is that the younger generation is not taking up STEM subjects ( science, technology, engineering and maths) like in India. In future there would be a dearth (of talent)," Mukherjee said during an informal meet with the media.
"We have materially reduced our dependency on work visas through increased local hiring and focusing on local mobility and training across all major geographies of operation," TCS has said in its latest annual report adding that active initiatives have been taken to structurally increase the availability of engineering talent in major markets by making students take up the STEM subjects.
To achieve this, TCS has been running programs like GoIT for the last several years targeting middle level schools in US encouraging youth to explore app development, design thinking and technology careers while for the past one year it has launched 'Ignite My Future' in School program providing free professional development and resources for educators to integrate computational thinking.
"The target is to reach 20,000 educators and one million students over a five-year period," the HR head said.
Under the GoIT program, a student would typically spend 2-3 days in TCS's delivery centre and solve problems in analytical skill or robotics domain.
Back home, TCS, and also other IT companies are facing talent crunch in data science, the foundation skill for creating algorithm and Artificial Intelligence, the hottest domain now.
"With automation, the kind of skill sets we require is changing. But there is dearth of good data scientists in India. That's why TCS is working with universities to start masters in data science while efforts are on to combine engineering and management disciplines.
But automation would also bring down hiring, he said.