Over 50 per cent of the job seekers in India’s IT sector consider enhancing knowledge and skills as one of their top professional aspirations in life, but almost half (50.72 per cent) of these professionals are seen to have low learning agility, or an inability to make the quick learning shifts that are needed to stay relevant.
These are the findings of a survey on ‘Mindset state of IT Professionals in India on Career Growth & Aspirations’ conducted by SCIKEY, a talent life-cycle management venture.
The IT sector depends on the ability of talent to unlearn and relearn quickly to remain relevant to their clients. With 25 per cent of the IT workforce profiled as having low learning agility, this is likely to create a severe job vs skills mismatch in a sector that needs talent with a high learning agility fuelled by ever newer emerging technologies.
The data also showed that only 2.62 per cent of job-seekers appear to have high learning agility, and almost all (91 per cent) are making efforts to improve their skills further. With such a small percentage (2.62 per cent) of highly agile learners compared with low learning agility (25 per cent), not only will the private sector need to come up with creative and effective ways of quickly upskilling or re-skilling its current talent, but policy-makers too will have to look at new education methods to bridge the gap and reverse this trend.
Low leadership potential
SCIKEY research also revealed that 11.10 per cent of job seekers are absolute instruction-takers, who depend completely on being spoon-fed, making them highly inefficient and irrelevant in an age of digital transformation and automation, especially in the IT sector.
The findings also indicated that just 1.71 per cent professionals are profiled with excellent management skills, and only 1.10 per cent of professionals exhibit the kind of high leadership skills required to excel in this era. The analysis also found that only 0.6 per cent of professionals could be groomed for a CXO role.
The SCIKEY report is based on insights from 10,117 respondents. These include mainly IT professionals between the ages of 22 and 47 from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Haryana and West Bengal.
New-age job requirements
The SCIKEY Research Report has been derived from SCIKEY’s AI-driven MindMatch Algorithm, an algorithm that can map a professional’s mindset and is based on a set of questions that understand the individual’s emotional quotient, ego filters, aspirations and belief levels, habits and ecosystem disturbances that cause distractions and stress in a professional’s life. This data is further filtered to derive professional behavioural elements of any individual and is called a ‘mindset map’.
Commenting on the survey, Alok Kumar, Director, SRKay Group, said: “The SCIKEY analysis shows that leaders, innovators and quick learners are in short supply and that will challenge the India IT growth story, while a large number of existing IT professionals will struggle to cope with the spurt in demand for the kind of skills that fast-changing, new-age jobs will require.”
SCIKEY aims to provide end-to-end technology and people science enabled solutions spanning the life-cycle from talent discovery to alignment and sustained engagement with an organisation.