A report by AIMResearch titled, Recession Impact on Analytics Retrenchment and Open Jobs, suggests that while most industries will experience retrenchments, the Telecom sector will buck the trend and would, in fact, be hiring and increasing their analytics workforce by 2.5% over the next few months.

The report details the impact of the recession on retrenchments and open jobs across the Analytics Domain and the impact that the lockdown and COVID – 19 pandemic has created across various industries and its analytics function.

According to the report, the Travel & Hospitality domain has been worst affected, with many companies across these segments retrenching up to 20% of their staff across functions. It also suggests that jobs in the IT function will be relatively less impacted during recessions.

The Analytics and Data Science function, along with other non-core functions, across many sectors, is adversely impacted in terms of operations during the ensuing recession. However, industries such as FMCG and Telecom firms, will not experience significant revenue contraction and correspondingly will not proportionately retrench employees across their organisations.

The report suggests that the analytics function of the broader Automobile & Industrials industry would, unfortunately, see the maximum layoffs at about 9%. This is followed by the Banking – Captive sector/segment, which would experience layoffs of about 8.2%.

According to the report, the Tourism & Hospitality industry has been the worst impacted sector in terms of revenues and volumes. However, the size of the Analytics functions across this sector is small, and analytics professionals are required to analyse the data and transformation in the industry. Hence, this sector would expect a cumulative layoff figure of 7.8%.

The Analytics services firms that provide boutique and end-to-end analytics services to clients across sectors and industries have carried out or would carry out retrenchments of about 6.2%, whereas BFSI firms would be retrenching 4.6% of their analytics personnel.

The report suggests that the analytics function of the e-commerce sector would not be adversely impacted. Similarly, across the IT sector, even if the global and domestic economic slowdown persists, the impact on overall operations would be less significant. The analytics operations across IT firms are not expected to contract significantly and retrenchment would be at 2.6%.

Domestic Pharma has seen a greater demand for a wide variety of Healthcare production during the unfortunate crisis. The combined retrenchment across the Pharma sector would be 1.8%.

In terms of impact by the type of company, consulting firms, be it management consulting or analytics consulting,

have been and will continue to be the most affected, with 9.4% net layoffs, currently or in the near future. This is followed by the Captive Banking units, which are expected to be adversely impacted and a corresponding effect felt on the analytics functions. The Captive Pharma analytics units, on the other hand, will not be as adversely affected

The city-wise impact of retrenchment is along expected lines, with the maximum impact taking place in the IT hub of Bengaluru at 5.1%. This is followed by Mumbai with 4.7% of the layoffs and Delhi with 4.4% of the layoffs. The smaller but upcoming hubs of Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Kolkata which have niche IT or exclusive sector-focused firms will see relatively fewer layoffs.

In terms of experience, entry-level and novice professionals have been retrenched the maximum at 7% as they require training in data specific tasks. Whereas mid-senior experience level of 10-15 years is the lowest in terms of retrenchment at 1%.

The report suggested that there has been a significant impact on open jobs as it saw a decline in jobs advertised by organisations for analytics operations. However, the impact on the analytics job market in India has not been as severe as the impact across the globe. As a result, the proportion of jobs (against global open jobs) advertised in India has risen from 7.9% in February 2020 to 9.2% in May.

It also suggested that the median salary of the advertised open jobs has also dropped expectedly. This has come down to INR 8.8 Lakhs from INR 9.7 Lakhs in January 2020.

In terms of open jobs by sector, Pharma & Healthcare has seen the largest jump in the proportion of open jobs for both year-on-year and year to date, followed by Telecom and e-commerce.

Bhasker Gupta, Founder & CEO, Analytics India Magazine said, “The recession due to the Covid-19 pandemic has led to unfortunate retrenchment in the analytics industry and would affect almost all sectors and company types. However, we see the analytics domain of most industries to be emerging from its effect in the coming future.”

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