India has been talking about investing more in AI and automation but the ground reality is starkly different. A recent survey revealed that at the end of August there were 93,500 vacancies in the data science sector which are yet to be filled. The reason, Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-founder, Great Learning, which conducted the survey, said was that India is lacking in the number of experienced and qualified teachers who can teach these subjects to the students.
The detailed survey also found that India’s share of data science jobs has been growing as large IT companies are increasing their presence in India. The Banking and Financial Sector is still the domain with the highest number of job openings. There has also been a demand for mid and senior-level professionals show a spike in 2020. The demand for Python professionals is still the highest among recruiters with almost 27 per cent requiring Python as the core skill. "It is closely followed by Java or JavaScript that is witnessing a 22 per cent demand. R comes third in the list at 10 per cent, the same as last year. Among Dashboarding and BI tools, Tableau skills are most in-demand with 11 per cent demand in August 2020, followed by Microsoft Power BI contributing 6.5 per cent demand. With greater adoption of cloud platforms across enterprises, the demand for cloud solutions including AWS (15 per cent), Azure Skills (9.7 per cent), and Google Cloud (5 per cent) continued to soar even during the lockdown," it noted.
Most of our colleges are not capable of delivering courses on AI, automation, Machine Learning and allied subjects, said Nair. "The vacancies are there due to massive dearth of talent in the space. While the importance of learning AI is not unknown to anyone, the biggest challenge we face is the shortage of high-quality teachers in the emerging technology space. It is just not possible for the majority of Indian institutions to deliver world-class education in fields like AI, Analytics, Machine Learning and Cloud Computing as India lacks high-quality teaching resources in these domains," he added.
The report also talks about there will be 75 lakh jobs lost by 2022 as automation takes over but there will be 150 million new jobs which will bridge the gap. But these jobs will require updated skills. Are we reskilling fast enough? "The current pandemic has reinforced the concept of lifelong learning more than ever before and offered many professionals time and opportunity to learn online and future-proof their careers. While as a nation our speed of transformation to digital may have been slow, we have been making steady progress. Whether you are currently a student in college or a working professional, it is imperative that you understand the future of work. And if what you are doing is at risk of automation or if your current skills are not aligned to the future drivers of your company or industry, this has to be a wake-up call to acquire new skills and make yourself more capable," said Nair.
Nair also added that the education gap needs to be filled and companies like his are working on that. "We are trying to solve this problem in multiple ways by enabling learners to learn from the best global and Indian faculty, and also from industry practitioners. We work with the best of educational institutions, faculty and industry experts and enable our learners to have access to the highest quality of education in these fields," he added. But the private players leading the sector comes with its own problems of exclusion of the poorest and that is why the government needs to provide similar facilities to the public which will be more accessible.
