By the end of this financial year, the telecom sector will let over 60,000 employees as a result of the consolidation that is forcing the operators, the infrastructure providers, tower companies and the associated retail units for optimising their staffing said the experts.
Nearly 65,000 telecom sector workers will lose their jobs by 31st March those function in the customer support and financial functions said the staffing firm TeamLease Services. These two segments are expected to let go of about 8,000 and 7,000 employees, respectively, it said.
The job losses will ease the industry stabilises and the sector would focus more on hiring the freshers said the Cofounder of TeamLease, Ritupurna Chakraborty.
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“There will be an impact to the tune of 60,000-75,000 jobs on the workforce of telecom service and infrastructure providers in 2019 as a consequence of the consolidation activities,” said the Chief Executive Officer of the staffing firm Randstad India, Paul Dupuis. “We expect the effect to continue through 2020 with a similar number of redundancies for the segments mentioned.”
Almost 15,000-20,000 people lost their jobs in sox months ended on 30th September said the industry executive. The Telecom Operators Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio Infocomm and the Vodafone Idda dis not respond to the emails seeking comments on the estimated the job losses.
“We are over the worst hump and now companies are looking to hire in areas like AI, big data and 4G network expansion. The first two quarters of FY19 saw the worst and that is over,” said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India, which represents the major telcos.
The next two quarters will see the maximum of 5,000 people losing the jobs across thr entire industry ecosystem. As the operators have slashed costs, the other businesses like the towers, infrastructure, retail chains and distributorships had to tighten their belts as well.
The sector had to let go over 1 lakh employees and also saw the high attrition of 20-25% on an average in 2017-2018 as thr Vodafone India and Idea Cellular has prepared to merge and Bharti Airtel has set out to buy the Tata Teleservices’s mobility segment and the Telenor India and the operators Reliance Communications and the Aircel has headed for the exit.
The Randstand estimates that thr telecom sector those include retail serv8ce, infrastructure and the vendor domains employs nearly 25 lakh employees.
TeamLease said that while there will be substantial job losses, there will also be new roles created in large volumes in areas such as project management, IT infrastructure. Profiles including data team leaders, technical directors and network installation are expected to be much in demand, it said.
All the recruiters aren’t expecting such a big blow for the workforce again. “We are at the fag end of turmoil in the telecom sector and I don’t see too much attrition in the sector as compared to previous years,” said A Ramachandran, senior partner at search firm EMA Partners.
“…we will gradually see selective hiring in areas like IoT and content creation/curation in telecom. At the senior level, there is considerable consolidation in most organisations and we will see hiring against only involuntary separation,” he added.
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