Upskilling: Upskilling is the way to make AI work for you

India’s huge advantage as a talent nation may be threatened as those performing repetitive tasks risk being put out of work by generative AI. This may put pressure on the IT industry Senior executives and experts warn that there is a need to continually improve the capabilities of their talent pool.

The country needs to not only train but also detrain quickly, they said.

“A global capabilities centre (GCC) of some US bank that has 10,000 people here is asking themselves: why do I need these people in India when a model I am running on my desk can do or generate the same thing?” Nigel Vaz, CEO of global digital business transformation company Publicis Sapient, told ET in a recent interview.

IT companies in the country will be under pressure to retrain the thousands of employees they employ to do so. Manual Testing that can be automated, he said.

According to experts, technology roles such as IT help desk, data entry and processing, network security, coding and testing are expected to be affected. Demand for some of these repetitive roles has declined by 25-30% over the past two years, data from TeamLease Digital shows. For example, 40% of organisations reported a reduction in job offers for manual testing roles.

In contrast, roles that require advanced skills such as AI Development and Cybersecurity We have seen a 30-35% increase in job openings, indicating the need for skills that complement AI Technologies.

It’s a fight between machines and humans, and the key to survival is to constantly upskill. The cycles of unlearning and relearning will accelerate exponentially, Vaz said. Krishna Vij, vice president of TeamLease Digital, said Improving skills Cycles are expected to shorten by 30-40% in the coming years.

“Around 55% of companies report a reduction in the time required for training programmes over the past two years. The demand for rapid adaptation is what is driving this trend,” said Vij.

Additionally, nearly 60% of companies feel their current training programs fail to fully address the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Employees may need to upgrade their skills quarterly or even monthly to keep up with technological advances, said RP Yadav, managing director of staffing firm Genius Consultants.

“Most people in IT, particularly those working in coding and data analysis, need to update their skills in as little as three to six months,” he said.

A structured approach to training may not make sense given the fluctuation, experts said.

“If you define a structured curriculum, you train your trainers and they conduct classroom training… Technology is changing so fast that it may have already moved ahead,” said Pari Natarajan, CEO of consultancy Zinnov.

Traditional rote-based learning would be detrimental to Indian talent in the current context, he added.

Many companies are leveraging in-house AI labs and centers of excellence, as well as hackathons and peer mentoring programs to foster innovation and creative problem solving, TeamLease’s Vij said.

Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, director of AI research at ManageEngine, the enterprise IT solutions division of Zoho Corp, said having a strong foundation in analytical thinking and statistical estimation is key.

“We hire engineers who can code, give them time to learn AI on the job, and in 98% of cases it has worked,” he said.

Young employees entering the workforce today need to get into a lifelong learning mode and stay updated on important industry trends, said Arvind Thakur, former CEO of NIIT Technologies.

“They have to recognize that they are in a world where things change very quickly,” he added. “In their formal education, what they learn in the first year of college may be outdated by the last year.”

In terms of technical skills, competency in cloud computing platforms, data science, analytics and visualization, business intelligence, cybersecurity and DevOps should be areas of focus, while developing specialized skills in AI, AR/VR, blockchain and others will be important.