Job Market 2002

• More and more job advertisements are appearing in the newspapers and magazines. 
• Even the software sector, which has felt the bulk of the USA slowdown, has started reviving. 
• The stock market is going up day by day. 
• New Call Centres are starting almost daily.

The previous year in the Indian Job market had spelt "hiring and firing". 
However, recent research conducted by Developer IQ shows that the employment outlook in India seems much stronger for technology workers even now.We have covered the top 40 industries, concentrating on the chosen 5 that have created the maximum number of employment opportunities. This information has been culled covering 25 dailies, magazines and newspapers from the Indian print media. 

Job Trends 
With an overview of the job trends that have occurred in the last 6 months, we can clearly see that there has not been a steady climb in the availability of jobs, rather there have been highs and lows. However, the good news is that there has been no drastic rise and fall in the employment trend. 
The IT industry round the world has taken a major beating due to the U.S economy slowdown. However the Indian IT industry remains less affected. Jobs in the IT industry have been on a freeze, but the number of layoffs has been negligible. 

Employment opportunities created in these industries have been analysed according to the level of management, namely junior, middle, senior and top. 
Junior level management includes employees with up to 3 years of work experience; the middle level requires an experience of three to ten years (e.g. project managers). Senior level management calls for about 10-15 years of work experience and includes General managers to Vice-Presidents. 
The top level refers to CEO's and directors with work experience of 15 years and above. There has been a huge demand for junior level employees in the IT industry. The two main reasons being, a flat hierarchy and the method used to calculate a project's worth. The project worth is calculated on the man-hours put in. Therefore, greater the manpower, higher the project worth. Essentially the Indian job market has not seen a drastic increase in the employment trends but is steadily opening up opportunities for workers including freshers. 

Call Centres 
One of the fast-growing segments of the IT Industry today are Call Centres. The qualification and experience expectations are very low and hence more and more people seem to find their careers in this arena. Not just that, almost six out of ten infotech companies are found with a call centre attached to them. 

There is a huge demand now for English-speaking graduates and basic programmers in the IT-enabled sector. Because of the call center business and other back-office operations (being run out of India) the business in the IT industry is still running. Typically, a call center in India has a computer-literate graduate handling a banking or insurance query for an American or European customer who would not even know that his call to a US-based firm was being directed to India. Call centers range from simple customer inquiry services to revenue-generating businesses with highly-trained personnel who can sell additional products or services. 

Hope prevails 
With both software and hardware firms more bullish about future prospects many companies have now begun hiring again. Offers that were deferred from last year are now being honoured, and more than 10,000 new jobs have been created. Reliance Infocom plans to hire another 5,000 people, Infosys 1,000 by this year-end alone, and Tata Consultancy Services has disclosed plans to hire about 3,000 software professionals in this financial year, 2002. 

Placements agencies 
The demand for software professionals has seen a considerable upswing, and the placement agencies have started to get fresh inquiries from companies for software professionals. The job market has suddenly turned for the better for the freshers. A recent report underlined the positive outlook on the Indian IT industry, predicting a 24% growth. This would make it one of the fastest growing IT economies in the world - a real turnaround for India's IT industry.

Software on demand 
In the programming world, where we have countless operating systems, programming languages, database tools, designing tools and all that makes a software company, we are left with an inability to make the right choice in pursuance of our careers. Let's take a look at what is happening and what is not in the IT industry today. 

Languages pertaining to web application development are still very much in demand. For example: C++, Java scripting, dynamic HTML, XML and other programming languages. Within the object oriented programming languages, all of them seem be on a high. C and C++ are as evergreen as ever. The .Net languages are running famously in the software market today. (Graph 1)

Java is seeing a slightly low phase but will surely pick up with the support of programmers who are still loyal to Java. In the world of operating systems, Windows still reigns. Linux seems to be making its own place in this arena. Talking of Linux, the open source community is growing faster than how the IT industry once grew. (Graph 2)

The three top heroes of the database world are Oracle, Sybase and SQL. (Graph 3) 

There are a number of other interesting new ones but they haven't been successful in making a mark for themselves.In all, the market is picking up. Go out and get yourself a great job!