The IT and ITES sector has been one of the most revered sectors in the state of Andhra Pradesh and has also been a major employer in the state.
In fact just recently IT conglomerate Infosys opened its doors to a state of the art development centre in the city of destiny armed with a capacity of 1000 people.
The centre was unveiled with much fanfare with the Chief Minister, Mr Jagan Mohan Reddy himself inaugurating the DC along with Infosys top management.
While big players in the IT industry like Infosys and others have set up their offices in Visakhapatnam and others expected to follow suit, the Covid-19 onslaught coupled with automation have dented the hiring process in the state.
However, despite the slowdown biggies are setting up Satellite offices in tier 2 and 3 cities for one main reason i.e. ‘Employee Convenience’.
Andhra Pradesh is a hub for engineers and it is known for its talent pool. There are a lot of people having their roots in AP and working in IT offices in cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, etc. And, now with the pandemic gone by most companies are strictly advocating Work from Office.
Sources from Infosys Visakhapatnam told Vizag Industrial Scan, “Out of 3 lakh employees in the company 40,000 are from the districts of Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram, Srikakulam, East Godavari, etc. We set up this facility in Vizag for their convenience and also so that they can stay along with their family. There are no fresh recruitments as of now.”
Concurred Mr R L Narayana, Corporate Vice-President of WNS said, “Vizag has a large talent pool of engineers. From Vizag alone around 60,000 graduates pass out every year. On an average, 20k students are B tech and M tech graduates”.
Albeit Mr Narayana pointed out that only experienced employees based out of AP are being transferred to their hometowns. Freshly recruited employees are still being required to move to the bigger cities for their training and experience.
As Mr Krishna Mohan of InspireEdge, said, “We organise workshops and training programs for the freshers to be on par with the industry expectations and to retain talent by upskilling the team.”
Mr Murali Bulusu of Sankhya Technologies acknowledged that over the last 2 decades, there has been sourcing of talent from the regions of Vizag, Srikakulam, East and West Godavari, Krishna, Vijayawada.
He however stressed on the need to position Vizag as a hub for talent so that hiring opportunities for the locals increase.
Speaking on soft skills, Mr Souvik Nandi, Location head and Director Operations, Concentrix, said there is an urgent need of enhancing communication skills of new hires.
“We are struggling to hire employees with good English speaking skills”, said Mr Nandi.
