New Delhi: As Nitika Wadhwa flips through newspapers, the absence of advertisements for walk-in-interviews does not bother her at all. After working with a BPO for a short while and then an NGO, she is today working as a technical writer. She says she hasn’t seen even a single person in her function being handed a pink slip even in these recessionary times.
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“Everyday I get 5-10 mails which say you’re short-listed for an interview. I’m getting calls from consultants. A lot of my software engineering friends ask me about what I have done. They want to do this course and become a technical writer as it is a comfortable job, more imaginative more creative” says Nikita.
“There is a requirement of 200,000 to 250,000 people with such skill sets,” says Rakesh Shukla, founder of technical writing firm, TWB, which also runs a training institute. Simply put technical writers are people who communicate technical information in a manner that even non-technical reader can understand. And Rakesh says that in the next 4 years technical writing will be roughly a $1.5 billion industry. And even in the current slowdown, his business has been growing.
There are other sectors which are doing well. Insurance for instance, which awaits an increase in FDI limits, will be hiring in big numbers in 2009. Raj Bawa, MD, James Blake Solutions says: “The maximum hiring would be in infrastructure and IT still, though in niche areas like Solutions Architect. Insurance too will be hiring. It is already huge in India. Mobile Phones, clinical research and general market research are other sectors that are doing well.”
And the year of global slowdown has marked a high point for those in the legal profession. They have seen their work increase. Gurgaon based Law firm UnitedLex, plans to double its headcount to 1000 in the next six months. Ajay Agarwal, Chief Solutions Officer at UnietdLex, says: “End of 2008-2009 is a major inflection point. The size of business is doubling over night”.
According to a study by Forrester, legal outsourcing to India will touch $4 billion by 2015, employing 79 thousand people. Those in the industry feel that the figure might be reached even before that.
TWB is training an entire group of people who were handed pink slips by a leading IT firm. UnitedLex also has people who have made a shift and are doing the courses side-by-side. What is common to all these fields is that with little training the candidates can acquire new skills and change their profession.