Brace for more job loss as telecom sector may let go of 65,000 employees by end of March 2019.
The telecom sector may do away with 65,000 jobs primarily in the customer support and financial services verticals by the end of 2018.
Before the end of this financial year, the telecom industry will witness a layoffs of more than 60,000 people because of the consolidation that is forcing the telecom operators, the infrastructure providers, Mobile tower companies and the associated retail units for optimizing their staffing said the experts.
Nearly 65,000 telecom industry labors and 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 stabilizes and the sector would focus more on hiring the freshers said the Cofounder of TeamLease, Ritupurna Chakraborty.
“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.”
Just about 15,000-20,000 people across India lost their employments in last six to eight months finished on 30th September as per the industry experts. The Telecom Operators Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio Infocomm and the Vodafone Idea did not react 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 coming two quarters will see the maximum layoffs of around 5,000 people losing the jobs across thr entire industry ecosystem. As the operators have slashed tariff rates and data costs, the other businesses like the towers, infrastructure, retail chains and distributorships had to do lots of cost cutting and downsizing in order to sustain in the industry.
The telecom industry needed to layoff more than 1 lakh employees and also saw the high attrition levels of 20-25% on an average in 2017-2018 as the Vodafone India and Idea Cellular has prepared to merge and Bharti Airtel has set out to buy the Tata Teleservices’s telecom business and the Telenor India and the operators Reliance Communications and the Aircel has headed for the exit.
The Randstand estimates that the telecom sector those include retail service, 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 Internet of technology 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.