Indian IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services is on a hiring spree in Australia with an emphasis on employing local talent rather than flying them in from overseas.
The company’s regional head Girish Ramachandran said that the company was committed to employing an extra 250 Australian staffers each year — with 150 additional fulltime IT professionals to be added to the business. The company currently offers 150 positions annually to local talent.
TCS has also pledged to open up positions for 90 IT & engineering graduate trainees as well as an intake of 10 to 15 undergraduate paid intake interns.
Mr Ramachandran said the recruitment drive was part of a broader push by TCS to contribute to Australia’s innovation agenda.
“We have been talking to a lot of people both at home and in Australia and given that we have scaled up our presence here over the last few years we wanted to do something meaningful,” he said.
Part of that initiative is helping add to Australia’s IT proficiency and Mr Ramachandran said that includes creating pathways for graduates and encouraging high schoolers to pursue technology careers.
With about 35 per cent of TCS’s Australian operations staffed by locals, Mr Ramachandran said it was time to shift gears.
“We were always recruiting professionals with experience in business analysis, program management and customer facing roles, but this year we will hire directly from campuses in Australia.”
“We are also part of the Colombo Plan that will see us take students from here to come and work with us in India,” he added.
TCS’s intent is a welcome sign for the local IT sector and a step in bridging the skill shortage in the country.
According to Mr Ramachandran, TCS mainly relies on overseas talent when it’s looking for people with international; project delivery and implementation service.
However, it’s a trend that he thinks can be reversed over time.
“As we build critical mass I think we can start taking Australian talent into overseas projects,” he said.
As for the trends that aspiring IT professionals will need to get a hang on, Mr Ramachandran said that the ‘agile’ mantra is likely to become the default mode of operations.
“All of our customers are adopting agile, they want quick results and this methodology will be the order of the day,” he said.
“Digital will be all pervasive and the challenge will be take the trends like mobility, cloud, AI and Big Data and weave them together.”
“You can’t just have one skill you will need a combination of skills, you will need to be adaptable and flexible,” he added.
Reader comments on this site are moderated before publication to promote lively and civil debate. We encourage your comments but submitting one does not guarantee publication. We publish hundreds of comments daily, and if a comment is rejected it is likely because it does not meet with our comment guidelines, which you can read here. No correspondence will be entered into if a comment is declined.
