These tech companies still have sufficient manpower to serve their main telecom clients, they said, adding that Indian telcos Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea (Vi) have been hiring engineers and software and application developers in droves over the last two years for their 5G services rollout, which should more than offset any potential impact from the layoffs.
“Regardless of team size, most tech companies will honour contracts and, hence, workflow/support to telcos won’t be affected,” Sachin Alug, chief executive of staffing firm NLB Services, told ET.
Alug said he expects the hiring of specialists and experienced professionals in the telecom sector to increase in the coming quarters, since the telcos have already acquired 5G spectrum and they would want to go into the market with new services and offerings around 5G.
Also, hiring and skilling of the workforce in technical profiles has helped Indian telcos save up to 30% on vendor cost. These profiles include developers, embedded engineers (those who have expertise across two or more areas of engineering), data scientists, data analysts and security experts.
Munira Loliwala, business head at staffing firm TeamLease, said, “There are two things at play. One, the telcos have already built a workforce to cater to their tech needs, cutting down vendor costs in the process, and second, having their own captive workforce ensures that their dependence on vendors to complete projects has reduced.”
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According to Munira, when clients start building their own workforce for a specific profile, the vendors providing those services also pull back on their employment as the number of professionals required for such projects is
small.
Most of this workforce is employed on a permanent basis, with an average life cycle of two-five years.
As 5G rollouts get underway, these profiles will be crucial for telcos, and hiring activity in the space will continue for at least the next two years, some experts said.
Over the last few months, Microsoft has laid off around 2,000 employees, and Google has warned of layoffs if the performance doesn’t improve. Meta and Apple too have laid off 60 and 100 employees, respectively, so far.
