TCS, Infosys witness dip in younger employees

livemint.com:

Mint's analysis shows the share of young workers in TCS's workforce has fallen from 59% in FY22 to 50.3% in FY24. For Infosys, that's a drop from 60% to 55% over the same period.

Analysts attribute this drop to low fresher hiring and weak growth of IT services companies in the fiscal gone by, and not so much to the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) or generative AI taking over entry-level jobs. “In an environment when the IT services sector’s growth was fast until 2022, companies knew that there were projects to deploy new hires so they would hire more.

Now growth expectation are low, which is why the fresher intake is low. Once growth revives, the younger employee headcount might pick up," said Pankaj Kapoor, senior vice-president and head of strategy, investor relations & ESG, at Mumbai-based business process management company Firstsource.

Kapoor, who has tracked the Indian IT services industry for almost two decades, also said, “GenAI is not having an impact on fresher hiring as of now." An email sent to TCS went unanswered, whereas the Infosys spokesperson said its responses to Mint’s questions were covered in its annual report. IT services companies have anywhere between 75% and 85% of their workforce based out of India.

For instance, Cognizant Technology Services Corp had 254,000 employees or 73% of its 347,700 workforce working out of India at the end of December 2023, according to its annual report. Bengaluru-based Infosys, which is yet to disclose the geographical distribution of its employee numbers for last year, had more than three-fourths of its global employee count of 343,234 in India at the end of March 2023, according to its annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).