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Top1. Introduction
Indian IT sector employs 4.4 million people. During 2019-20, it generated approximately 2 lakh new jobs (NASSCOM, 2020), thereby becoming one of the highest sector employers. On one hand, jobs generated by the IT sector have amazingly changed the lives of its workforce, offering better pay, a possibility for an overseas trip, and sustaining superior quality of life (Upadhya, 2008). In contrast, instability and suspicions drawn from technological advancements and business volatility create hazards for employment prospects (Verma & Agarwal, 2017). Indian IT sector has been encountering a variety of challenges recently. Automaton and modern technologies such as Cloud, Azure, and Aws have caused an enormous fall in the number of jobs. Furthermore, occurrences of dot-com failure, stringent visa rules, and digital technologies provide additional challenges for present jobholders within the IT sector.
Overall human capital has a significant impact on the financial performance of IT organizations (Gupta and Raman, 2021). For the sustainability of the Indian IT industry, there is a need to focus on career determinants as it impacts employee engagement (Kumari, 2021). What differentiates the scenario of the IT sector from other sectors is the faster speed of technological evolution as compared to the expansion of skills in human capital. Skills scarcity is predicted owing to the disparity between skills development and technological advancement (McLaughlin et al., 2012), resulting in an enormous deficiency of skilled human capital that can support emerging technologies (Imran et al., 2019). Furthermore, IT professionals in India do not seem to have adequate skill sets to meet this demand of enormous re-skilling themselves in exponential technologies swiftly. The management of IT organizations has been pursuing various strategies to “up-skill and cross-skill” their workforce. However, it is a lack of resources awareness on the latest technologies and employees are not willing to work beyond their comfort zone to learn according to the emerging technologies for their cross-skills (Ramasamy and Reddy, 2018). Though the instability in the IT industry might imperil the careers of various professionals, it concurrently creates better opportunities going forward. Operating in this unpredictable environment of job prospects, IT professionals in India have gradually become skilled at shaping their careers through overcoming threats they face. Such as, the workforce was found to be engaged in self-initiated up-skilling amid the latest technological developments (Khatri, 2017). In literature, such willingness to tackle the volatile alterations due to transformations in the jobs and transformations at the workplace, proactively taking part in the work-role, and still finding the way amid a dynamic and erratic environment is identified as career adaptability (Bimrose & Hearne, 2012).