"The next greatest jobs might not be in engineering, law and medicine, but could be in fine arts, humanities, could be in mathematics or music. Therefore, it is important that we redefine what we thought of careers yesterday and what are actually going to be the careers tomorrow"
There are several initiatives aimed at generating employment and employability in our country with an aim to transform opportunities for India’s youth to move up the value chain of employment and make our demographic dividend a blessing. In this context, the Mumbai Chapter of the National HRD Network had recently organised their 'Career Fest' in Mumbai, as a platform to provide the student community and young professionals an in-depth understanding of career opportunities in diverse sectors and enable them to make informed career choices. Human Resources Professional, Gurubharan Swaminathan, Regional HR Head, Tata Consultancy Services - BPS, has a rich experience of 12 years working with Tata Consultancy Services. He has worked as a Regional Head of Human Resources managing a hundred-member HR team for 18,000-employee workforce in Chennai. Corporate Citizen presents his talk on career opportunities in BPO and Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) sector, wherein he states that which jobs will be replaced by robots in future, how to be relevant in this fast developing industry and how career opportunities are changing daily…
I will talk about the few changes that we are seeing in the world today and based on those changes how should we prepare ourselves to choose our careers in this new age. The most important skill you need to have before entering the new age job market is to unlearn and learn. If you want to be employed in this fast changing world, you should have agility in learning newer things and skills.
We did an analysis on the number of jobs that exist today and those jobs, which won’t be there in the future, 45% of jobs that exist today will be lost. All the jobs that will be lost are the jobs, which are repetitive in nature and which are rule based decision-making in nature. While, the jobs that are going to remain are jobs that involve creativity, imagination and the jobs that require empathy and human connect. If you look at medical field, the doctor will be replaced faster as compared to the nurse. There are robots, which can perform surgeries, but care giving is a very human thing and no robot can replace that human empathy. So doctors will be replaced faster than the nurses. In factories, robots are going to replace the entire assembly lines. The designer who will design the next generation car cannot be replaced.
Another thing that is happening rapidly is that the jobs are becoming redundant so you need to ask yourself that ‘what do I have that a robot doesn’t and which can never get replaced’. If you are able to tell a joke, you won’t be replaced. If you are giving care that cannot be replaced by robots. Therefore, gain skills that cannot be replaced by robots.
A couple of decades ago, engineering was the most sought after course in India. In the elite B-schools such as Harvard, management and law were the most sought after courses. The most number of applications received last year for such elite B-schools were for fine arts. The next greatest jobs might not be in engineering, law and medicine, but could be in fine arts, humanities, could be in mathematics or music.
Therefore, it is important that we redefine what we thought of careers yesterday and what are actually going to be the careers tomorrow. The whole concept of job and career is changing. The jobs of tomorrow are going to be something called as a Hollywood Model. If you take a particular movie crew that comes together for a movie. The movie crew is not full time employees of that movie. They all come together for that particular movie. After they have done with one movie, they move from one movie to the other. When an artist is working on a movie, he or she has signed up to 2-3 movies parallelly. That could be the reality of the tomorrow. Many people are freelancing; many people are taking multiple projects, which could also be the reality of tomorrow.
BPS industry in India has a workforce of about 2.5–3 million employees. They are the unsung heroes; they work in the back end of the every single transaction that exists today. Earlier, people used to assume that BPS means call centre or data processing. BPS is not data processing. Like as I said earlier, Indian BPS industry has a workforce of about 2.5–3 million employees out of which 85,876 people are employed in TCS-BPS, it changes by the hour. What is interesting to note is that imagine in a workforce of 85,000 employees, we have 400 doctors. You might be wondering what doctors are doing in a business company. Not just doctors, we also have 600 mathematicians and statisticians and about 400 graphic designers. All these people are working in the BPS environment.
We are servicing 20 different industries. The industries range from pharma to mortgages, to banking to insurance to manufacturing. Let’s take pharma industry for example, when a particular drug is introduced in the US, it goes through Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approvals. Now our BPS employees and the doctors, which I earlier told you about, are involved in analysing of those clinical trials and submitting their reports to the pharma companies and which then the pharma companies submits to the FDA. So next time when you see a drug that is released in the market there is a huge contribution of BPS folks in launching the drug in the market. Similarly, in the banking industry, you must have heard of havala transactions– illegal funds transfer, where the black money is sent. Now in BPS, in banking sector, we have a department called anti-money laundering and there are about 1200 people working in anti-money laundering unit. They are operating for about 40 banks across the world. Their job is to monitor transactions happening through the banks all over the world so that they can identify if there is any money- laundering going on. We have ex-CBI officers, ex-Financial Regulators in those jobs. How many of us must have thought that CBI officers and Financial Regulators are involved in BPO jobs?
If you remember during the US Presidential election, most of the market research had predicted that Donald Trump would lose but the opposite happened. Now for the market research, 800 of our mathematicians and statisticians are involved. They do market predictions for companies, for policy makers around the world–they analyse the data. For example, you must have heard about Walmart, the largest brick and mortar retailer. The way they stock their inventories has a particular pattern, now the pattern has to tell us that when do I need to stock up something and when it needs to be reordered. One of the studies showed that whenever there is a cyclone or a storm approaching, people stock up on beer, candles and marshmallows. Now the jobs of analysts is to predict and give models and say whenever a storm is approaching, according to data models, you need to stock up on these seven things, the sales of which will be 20 times the sales of other items. This is done in the BPS.
Many times, we will meet people who will say that BPO is about data processing and customer support. In addition, there are a myriad of other things happening in BPS. There are 20 different industries and across these 20 industries, we do some fascinating work.
"Most of the finest actors in the movie industry, today, started with drama. Drama is live, movie is not and this is the exact difference between BPS and IT, because in BPS you are working on live transactions all the time. For example, you are working on bank’s data. From the time, I put my ATM card into the ATM until I get my cash there are four BPS transactions involved"
Jobs in BPS are categorised in six types depending upon the complexity.
Now in the next 2-3 years, first two type of jobs will be merged into automation. Computers will do the job much more efficiently and much cheaply. Simple data entry and complex data entry will be automated. The third type of work, which is Rule Based Decision Making, in which half of jobs we will lose to automation in next 18-24 months. The only kind of job, which will be left for us, is little bit of rule based decision making, which computers cannot do because of regulations, analysis based decision-making, judgement based decision-making and coding based work. So that’s what the entire business industry is going to be left with.
BPS industry for example, comes into picture in the Passport Seva Kendra. Few years back, I remember standing in a queue of the passport office. You then needed to have a contact in the first place even to get an appointment. You had to go at the passport office there at least 2-3 times. You had to wait for at least 45 days to get the passport. Now the appointment is online, you go at a particular slot; even if you are half an hour early, you can’t get in, the middleman is completely eliminated. You spend two hours’ time in the passport office. You get your passport sent to you at your home. Now that’s the magic of BPS to transform something.
If you have to compare BPS and IT, the simplest example is the difference between movie and drama.
Most of the finest actors in the movie industry today, started with drama. Drama is live, movie is not and this is the exact difference between BPS and IT, because in BPS you are working on live transactions all the time. For example, you are working on bank’s data. From the time, I put my ATM card into the ATM until I get my cash there are four BPS transactions involved. From the time that I raise my request for a fraudulent transaction and get a response, there are 14 transactions involved. Everything you are working on is a live transaction. The impact what you are doing is live.
In a drama, if you cannot afford to make a mistake such as forgetting a line. However, in a movie you can edit and make it look like it actually happened, you can shoot with a different person. You don’t have that kind of luxury in the drama. That is the difference between BPS and IT industry.
Another thing about BPS industry is that the 500th transcation is as important as the 50,000th transaction. I will give you an example that happened recently, there was a credit card transaction that had happened where one employee had made a mistake in the decimal point. Now decimal point mistake is hardly a mistake right? The actual amount that had to be transferred was $5000 but the decimal point was put after 12-13 digits and had become $500 trillion. Now imagine if the transaction had actually completed, not just the bank but also the treasury of the internet banking would have been empty. They would have to call up the Prime Minister of that country and tell him that ‘sorry, your country is bankrupted due to a decimal point error made by our BPS employee’. Thankfully, we had a process that caught that error. The cost of an error is extremely high in BPS.
"The age of becoming a manager and supervisor is also very young. The average age of a manager is about 25 of entering the field is 21-22"
By Vineet K
