Capgemini Re-skilling India Workforce in Response to Automation

French BPO giant Capgemini is responding to the reality of automation by re-skilling its employees in India.

“In this changing environment, we need to create a pipeline of leaders,” said Patrick Nicolet, Capgemini’s senior executive, in an interview with India’s financial daily BusinessLine, adding that new digital technologies are transforming the sector.

Nicolet announced that Capgemini is already running a pilot to re-skill engineers for the wave of incoming automation technologies. Over the course of one year, the training program will provide participants with a certificate authenticating their skill in new technologies.

Meanwhile, addressing a Nasscom summit, Srinivas Kandula, Capgemini’s chief in India, criticized corporate peers, saying companies were not investing enough in upgrading the skill-sets of their IT employees. In his statement, he claimed that more than half of the workers in India’s IT sector are “just not trainable”.

Kandula went on to predict that thousands of employees at the middle and higher rungs of the corporate ladder would lose jobs due to automation and advancing technologies.

More than a half of Capgemini’s global workforce is based in India, with the outsourcer running delivery centers in just about every major city across the country.

The lack of IT workers with skills in new technologies is currently a hot debating topic in IT corridors across the country, with the country’s outsourcing lobby group, Nasscom, admitting that more than a million workers need to be re-skilled.

In its latest report, advisory firm McKinsey & Company has warned that nearly half of the workforce in Indian IT firms will be “irrelevant” in the next three to four years.

The IT industry in India, valued at $150 billion, employs around 3.9 million people.