Cognizant and Capgemini are looking to hire 35,000 fresh engineers

• Technology majors Cognizant and Capgemini are hiring as many as 35,000 campus freshers this year.
  
• Capgemini said it will hire 15,000 students from Indian universities, who will join the company next year at an average salary of ₹3.8 lakh.
  
• Cognizant is looking to hire over 20,000 ‘digitally-skilled’ graduates in 2020 — increasing the average compensation for campus freshers to ₹400,000 per annum.
  
• The two multinationals are also reskilling their employees to grow their digital businesses.

After massive structural rejig with layoffs and reskilling initiatives last year, two technology majors with heavy presence in India — Cognizant and Capgemini — are hiring as many as 35,000 campus freshers this year.

French multinational Capgemini is planning to hire as many as 15,000 students from Indian universities in 2020-21. These graduates will join the company next year at an average salary of ₹3.8 lakh per annum. However, for those hired from top tier IITs and NITs, salaries can go as high as ₹6.5 lakh. They will also account for nearly 10% of the total hires.

“The net headcount in India has continued to grow well with strong hiring year-on-year and our perspectives for 2020 look good too. Globally, we also continue to increase our overall headcount by 5.1% year on year,” Capgemini said last year when it laid off over 500 employees.

Meanwhile, Cognizant too is back to sprucing up its employee base. It is looking to hire over 20,000 digitally-skilled graduates in 2020. It also increased the average compensation for campus freshers to ₹4 lakh per annum. This is an 18% surge from last year’s campus salaries.

“We continue to be a net hirer of engineering, science, management and other graduates as well as experienced professionals. With more and more students in campuses becoming digitally ready, we have announced a 30% increase in our hiring of engineering and science students for 2020,” the company spokesperson said.

Focus remains on reskilling employees

These multinationals which have laid off employees last year and are back to hiring - indicates a growing trend to employ those with digital skills. Digital technologies, including cloud services comprise over 50% of Capgemini’s growth. While for Cognizant, the digital revenue has been growing by more than 20% year-on-year.

Young engineers could be partly ready to take on digital roles as they learn new age skills for cloud, IoT. Others are also easier to train, helping companies expand their digital employee base.

These IT majors are are also actively reskilling their employees. “We have 1,800 certified consultants, while our nearest competitor in India is 500. The focus is on continued skilling. On average, we are reskilling 60,000-plus employees,” Ashwin Yardi, CEO of Capgemini India told the Times of India. The company claims to have reskilled over 51,000 people in 2019 so far — on emerging technologies like cloud, devOps, and big data.

Cognizant is also doing the same. We have doubled our investment in Cognizant Academy in 2020. To accelerate our digital momentum, we believe we need to hire or reskill approximately 25,000 resources in 2020, and we have started to operationalise this," Brian Humphries, CEO of Cognizant said.


See also:
Cognizant to hire 20,000 ‘digitally ready’ freshers — with higher starting salaries of ₹4 lakh per annum

Learn or leave — tech majors are either reskilling employees or slashing jobs

Benching, firing and re-deploying — the story of 20,000 employees at tech majors