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Employment Trends Entrepreneurship Industry Evolution Sectors

Impact of COVID on Industries and Job Market. Equip yourself to survive, sustain, and progress.

Job Market and Employment trends have undergone multiple transformations with time due to Recession, Globalization, Automation, and Digitalization. Currently, Industry is going through a tough phase due to pandemic, which has appeared nearly after 100 years.
The whole of the Industry is making assumptions and anticipations based on ever data possible. But unfortunately, most of them are not in alignment with the facts to date.

The changing scenario of the COVID census in different states, mortality rate, key people in politics, Govt or Essential services – tested positive, their duration of recovery, disturbance in the functionality of essential services … all have added to more confusion.

There were predictions made that, the second quarter of 2020-21 will see a considerable recovery. Whereas the job loss has increased, and pay cuts have prolonged till next quarter. Few of the Companies have announced pay cuts till March 2021. Appraisals, Bonus, and Variable Pay, have deferred until infinity.

Sectors most affected like Hospitality, Airlines, Automotive, Aerospace, Retail are struggling for survival. The Recovery Rate of Industries impacted due to COVID is very slow. The cascading effect is creating an enormous blow to the other Industries in the supply chain. Employees with higher Salaries, Senior people with monitoring roles, Support departments, Jobs that can be replaced by digitalization, Business Development roles are on the Target for retrenchments. Campus recruitments stopped for a year.

The positive side of the situation is, Junior level, capable and efficient people are elevated with higher responsibilities and opportunities to perform and acquire more senior roles once the market stabilizes. Most of the jobs are using virtual platforms to interact, reducing cost and time for both organizations and employees. The Industry will further explore and innovate newer means to perform and sustain.

Work from home will, in the future, give opportunities to more people in 2- tier, 3- tier cities, villages to work for MNC’s from their homes. Geographies won’t limit people to smaller or lesser opportunities. Educated Men and Women in small towns or villages will not have restrictions in career growth or opportunities. Lifestyle and exposure will improve in small cities.

Sectors like Pharma, Retail like Grocers, Vegetable vendors, Automation, Digitalization, few Mfgg units, Telecom, Networking, Computer Hardware, Infrastructure have seen the demand. Today’s job market belongs to only those people who can commit and deliver results in the least turn around time with utmost quality, integrity, and accountability. The changing demands and the situation of the Industry will force Companies to expect more from the employees. And Darwin’s theory of ‘Survival of fittest’ and ‘Natural Selection’ will force employees to thrive on competition. New Normal will come with many demands from the employers, better gauging criteria for performances and deliverables

Change is inevitable. One who adapts sooner will succeed, be it an Organization or an Individual. Equip yourself to survive, sustain, and progress.

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Current Affairs - Corporate Employment Trends Industry Evolution Outsourcing Model Sectors

How will Resource Outsourcing/Staffing help the Industry Post –COVID?

How will Resource Outsourcing/Staffing help the Industry Post –COVID?

India has generally seen a trend of engaging blue-collared, support staff resources on third-party/ off-roll/outsourcing/ staffing engagement. Post-2008 recession, the pattern of engaging white collared, skilled resources widespread by the IT Industry but still was limited to IT Industry alone. Post-COVID, the trend of engaging white collared, technical employees into Contractual engagement excluding few Senior Management and strategical roles is envisaged as a necessity and is in demand now irrespective of any sector.

IT Industry shifted to this trend after the 2008 recession based on the following observations.

  • Bench cost was consuming revenues of the Organization affecting the financial health of the Company,
  • Having resources on bench based on the projection of growth didn’t turn out to be a wise decision.
  • Expansion plans delayed due to many factors
  • Competition,
  • Pricing,
  • Clients’ Approvals,
  • Licensing,
  • Global Economic trends,
  • Currency conversion,
  • Downtime between projects,
  • Mapping of the maximum capacity of each resource
  • On the other hand, holding back employees with no complete engagement led to the attrition of resourceful employees, leaving behind only the average people in the stream.

Why is the Non-IT Industry ( Construction, Infra, Energy, etc..,) following this trend 13 years later?

Non-IT Industry, on the other hand, has been most apprehensive about this model. And there have been justifying reasons for the same.

The reasons for non-acceptance were many concerns.

  • Accountability and Integrity of skilled resources on contractual engagement.
  • Gauging of work in manual ways and not digital ways which make it challenging to monitor the process
  • Empathy towards fellowmen for the insecurities in contractual jobs
  • Comparatively smaller players in staffing with an unclear or obscurely defined scope
  • Payroll agencies with only documentation capabilities or partial responsibilities.

Development and transformation was slower owing to

  • Multi-level external challenges
  • Delay in deliverables where the line of activities got disrupted without a possibility of back up or control
  • Support from all departments on time
  • Inventory availability
  • Govt approvals
  • Fund shortage due to delayed receivables from the end client,
  • Change in instructions from management/client since this Industry has been extremely dynamic in nature.

All the above reasons led to resistance to change or non-prediction of uncertainties or inability to collectively assess the cost and business benefit.

In the current scenario, ambiguities are intensified to the extent of the uncertainty raising questions like “IS THERE A TOMORROW? IF YES, WHO ALL WILL JOIN US AND BE A PART OF TOMORROW?”

Limited visibility to the future by even big giants of the Industry, failure of long term plans, long term plans being replaced by short term plans have forced every Company to lie low and sustain. This, in turn, has led to Pay cuts, Lay-offs, Furloughs, increased pressure for people to perform. In such a scenario, the Human nature of sympathy, empathy towards fellowmen, bothering about developing people for long term returns, consideration towards others’ jobs, feeling stressed due to workload have taken backstage. What has been more critical is working towards sustaining the Organization (a foundation which houses employees) through the chaos irrespective of all reasons – genuine, significant, logical or fake, insignificant, illogical.

This situation has led Industry to adapt to staffing/ outsourcing as a stop-gap to cater to the active projects, or newly acquired projects for the next three years. Approximately three years expecting all the cascading effects, chain reactions, transitions, transformations, adaptations to be completed in three years, and implementation of new normal to start functioning successfully.

Hopefully, this opportunity should transform the staffing industry with a place in the Industry as an organized sector- breaking barriers, inventing, innovating, and leading to great opportunities and aspiration to the youngsters to step in this Industry by choice and not by chance. Because decisions are made out of interests, and interests lead to innovation.