The pace of creation of new White-collar jobs has been substantially slowed down, freshers are going to be having a difficult time. Livelihoods have been lost in the gig economy, said Padma Shri awardee Sanjeev Bhikchandani, Chairman, Naukri.com, in a recent webinar series Talk with the Legends.
The webinar interaction was hosted by Dr. Ajay Data, founder of Made in India app VideoMeet. Sanjeev further enunciated his thoughts on the state of jobs in India, “The job creation in sectors of health sciences, pharmaceuticals will pick up as per the announcement of vaccine. The philosophy to survive in the market for many companies is cutting down on cost and prevalent demand is for out of the box jobs like freelancing and content creation.”
Being an industry leader in the market of human resource management, consultancy and services via Naukri.com, Sanjeev drew a comparison between the times when platform was launched and now as the world stands at the brink of a global change in professional working culture. He led the foundation of Naukri.com in 1997 after his varied stints in the jobs of teaching, writing, consultancy etc. He further added, “India had a meagre of 14,000 accounts on Internet, it was a small market, hence revenue was less. As Internet penetration grew, the market expanded and we entered into the domains of real estate and matrimony, also raised capital. Now, in the pandemic we feel blessed to retain each of our 4500+ employees with us, as we were prudent to track the virus spread and apply WFH even before 10 days of the official government announcement.”
Focussing on the employee safety, Sanjeev highlighted WFH culture to be a temporary solution for the professional culture. Naukri.com unlike other global IT companies does not plan to introduce remote working as a permanent norm. As the Chairman believes in personal communication, social bonding and building on a sustainable work culture to be necessary elements in development of employee.
India is undoubtedly going through a difficult time, but we will come out of this. A disastrous terror attack like 9/11 shook US to the roots but they came out of it, Coronavirus is like a global attack and each nation is doing their best to combat it. He also shared his views on the recent Google Play Store dominance and survival of the start-ups amid testing times, “Acquiring monopoly & abuse of power are two distinctive ideologies, IT players with market dominance must not let the power rule their minds and action, otherwise it has potential to attract serious repercussions and will pivot policy changes and regulations. Start-ups must focus on conserving cash and acquiring more customers along with the investors.” Thousands of users attended the session via Laptop, Smartphones and Tablets on Made in India VideoMeet, video conferencing and webinar solution.
Dr. Ajay Data, host of the interaction said, “IT sector has grown into a mammoth during this pandemic. It is upon the discretion of corporate players about how they want to shape their road ahead with improved and advanced IT infrastructure. India has a lot of potential in terms of young tech enthusiasts, training programs and right guidance can convert them into an asset thus leading to a pool of jobs.”
