Sectors that will continue hiring during the economic crisis

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According to Neeti Sharma, senior vice president, TeamLease Services, industries such as fintech, food delivery, essential retail, healthcare, pharma, IT will continue to require workforce in much larger proportions as compared to other sectors. “Jobs such as safety counsellors, medical lab technicians, delivery executives, digital marketing experts and software developers will be in high demand,” she commented.

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Sectors that will hire

E-commerce will be one of the biggest recruiters in the coming months. Prominent brands like Amazon, Grofers and BigBasket have made announcements to ramp up recruitment. Last month, Grofers announced to hire 5,000 employees to meet the spike in orders.

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The ed-tech and health sectors too have seen impressive growth in this phase. As per job-search site Indeed, essential services – like the medical and public health fields — continue to drive demand. “Job seekers have shown greater interest in working for healthcare as searches witness an increase of 5 per cent during this period,” remarked Sashi Kumar, managing director, Indeed India.

Due to closure of schools and colleges, the education technology sector has shown tremendous potential. The job postings for online tutoring and e-learning were already witnessing a surge since 2017, as per Indeed, and this has gone up in the last three months. EdTech startup WhiteHat Jr recently announced to onboard 2000 plus teachers and 400 employees each month.

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Work-from-home is the new normal

Work from home has provided newer models to companies and even when the lockdown is lifted, there may be a percentage of employees who would not prefer coming to the office. However, as much as social distancing is not going anywhere, so are offices. “Candidates looking for employment will now need to be prepared for flexi work hours and workplace environments,” said Sharma.

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To make sure one is employable, knowledge of technology and digital skills even at a basic level is going to be a must-have, industry experts believe. Now even a marketing professional needs to learn how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning. Some of the key skills to get opportunities today is to be aware of market imbalances such as who is hiring and who is not. “For both middle and senior management – redefining leadership, understanding the choice of hiring contractors, freelancers and full-timers is critical. Being cross-functional and having the ability to shift mindsets quickly will be key to growing in one’s career,” said Vijay Sivaram, CEO, Quess IT staffing.

Elaborating further, Sharma said employees will have to possess digital skill sets to manage remote working and reporting, higher productivity and also learnability to continuously up-skilling and re-skilling themselves.

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Skill up, everything is available online

During the lockdown, many companies have started providing an opportunity to employees to upskill themselves by registering for online courses or attending virtual workshops.

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Rolls-Royce is publishing its world-class digital skills training programme for free. The company, as per a statement, intends to help people and businesses prepare for a potentially digital-centric recovery from Covid-19. Online learning platform Udemy has registered an increase of 80 per cent for professional courses during lockdown. So is Coursera, where machine learning, python and financial markets courses are a hit.