Gig work picking up pace ahead of full time employment in IT companies

IT services and consulting firms are replacing some full-time employees in technology roles with gig workers in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, staffing firms said.These technology services providers are stepping up hiring of gig workers in areas like Robotic Process Automation, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the staffing firms said.These were roles and areas where companies would have earlier hired full-time staffers, they said. IT companies have over the last few months cut costs by freezing hiring and laying off employees.As a number of employees are still on the bench due to fewer projects, companies are preferring not to take on more full-time employees.They have chosen to employ gig workers instead to save costs, deliver projects on time and access specialised talent, the staffing firms said. “People are more focussed right now on productivity than employee strength or employee bench strength. For the large IT and ITeS companies, the bench strength is getting replaced by on-demand hiring…This kind of hiring will increase,” said Kaushik Banerjee, vice president and business head of Teamlease.com.In relatively new technology domains like Cloud, AI and ML, companies are hiring gig-developers because the influx of projects is unpredictable although talent is required for incoming work.“The flexibility of (gig) hiring comes in where companies are able to deliver projects on time,” said Banerjee.Suraj Moraje, Group CEO at staffing firm Quess Corp, said that temporary staffing had increased.“As people are rapidly digitising and cutting costs, they are looking for temporary capacities to get work done…. Some companies are also hiring people in permanent roles as temporary employees initially,” he said.More people are looking for permanent jobs and more companies are looking to hire people for temporary roles, he added.Gig workers are also being hired at financial consulting firms for digital technology roles.According to analysts, consulting firms are trying to improve their project delivery capabilities in some new technology areas.“Efforts to improve analytics, cloud migration, cybersecurity, contactless commerce, digital transformation, and cost optimization are still very steady and increasing,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research.The redeployment of employees on the bench back to on-site work at technology services companies will also likely reduce ahead of the US presidential polls in November, Wang said.Specific queries to TCS, Infosys and Wipro on increased hiring of temporary staffers remained unanswered as of press time Sunday.

from Economic Times https://bit.ly/331zmgR
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