Today, India is a nation of youth; they are responsible for the country’s well-being. As a result, employability is a key factor towards making our demographic dividend a superpower. Initiatives are required to transform opportunities for India’s youth to use their abilities and work towards development of India. In this context, the National HRD Network (NHRDN) Mumbai Chapter, recently organised a Career Fest at Nehru Centre in Mumbai, bringing together industry and academia, to help the student community make informed career choices. The theme for the fest was “The future of jobs: challenges and opportunities for the youth of India”. Having a rich experience in telecom sector, Prasad Routray, Vice President & Business Head, Airtel Business-Mumbai Region, spoke on career opportunities in the telecom sector
Prasad has an extensive experience in the telecom industry since the last 19 years. His experience spans across various industry verticals such as Marketing and Development, IT, BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) across various geographies.
This is the fourth in a series— Corporate Citizen brings to you the excerpts from the development session where Prasad shared some pertinent aspects of his profession and took the students through the telecom segment by giving them an insight on how telecom came into picture in India and how it is growing further
The first thing I want you to tell is don’t look at this industry as representing telecom. Telecom, that is the first thing that I really want to put forward. Telecom has moved definitely to once a bigger area to multiple bigger areas and we call it the Information and Communication Technology area — the ICT space. So when you say communication or telecom, it is one part of the ICT platform. What I mean is, communication, yes, telecom companies are involved in communication. Is telecom around technology area? Yes. You will understand how much of technology is being produced, bought, or used in telecom infrastructure; therefore, you know how important that becomes. Regarding the information part of it, I am not saying that we are software companies, or we are the IT part of the world but definitely anything to do with analytics, artificial intelligence, cognitive analytics, all that, which is across industries—definitely are more or less born and brought up of so called telecom category of companies.
“you should join telecom because there are multiple things happening in the telecom world, which are not just limited to pure telecom but extend far beyond that”
Let us see what has happened in the last 10-15 years in India. We have seen things evolve. From 1995-2000, voice part came into existence, this is purely mobility breakthrough happening, we were moving out of textile part. India adapted to the voice part, and then the first privatisation took place. Later, government decided to put privatisation, therefore telecom industry started to see a series of investments come in, and luckily we were a part of it.
The period between 2002-2008 saw voice moving towards data, voice and data together came in picture; first time anyone heard the technologies like GPRS connections (General Packet Radio Service) and Edge networks—technologies came in. Some of you may not have the chance to look at the old Nokia phones, which were there at that time, then those phones started to move in the smartphone criteria, therefore it became the next move in the telecom industry.
The third part from 2013-2014, was about data more than voice. Then you started looking at technologies like 3G, broadband-the wide line side of it, first time in India people talked about Mbps vs Kbps, people talked about more Mbs, 100 Mbs, 1000 Mbs, that actually evolved as a third category.
The one that you are seeing 2015 onwards is actually a ‘new-age’ category like 4Gs and 5Gs that are expected to come and now it is all in Gbs. We are talking data and video. So if there were two ‘V’’s to look at, one is voice from 1995- 2000 onwards to now, video. I am just qualifying data as video, so there is voice and there is video. The entire journey is all about how the human behaviour has been moving around, because of technology, you get interruption in many ways. I don’t know how many of you will agree but, actually the technology is changing the behaviour or the new changing of behaviour to get the technology. It is the other one. There is lot of disruption happening. Therefore, I said that, this industry represents a lot of technological disruption that takes place.
Telecom has now redefined into something called as Information Communication Technology (ICT). So it is no more a telecom platform unless you substantiate. For example, annual turnover of T-Series company is close to 330-340 crores, on the other hand Wynk Music, which is under Airtel, has turnover around 1000 crores, and besides Gaana.com and others. Point being, if you are looking for a career in media or entertainment vertical or services vertical around this media set-up—a company within telecom growing in that manner and is digitally disruptive by saying put your music, put your likes, launch it and it is digital. I don’t know what T-Series is into except producing original voices and therefore why it is the next step as an organisation and that is why it is a part of ICT space.
The second thing, which I want to say, is that you might have heard about Airtel Money and Airtel Payments Bank, this is the last 30-day official bank. Entire India starts with about 75,000 to a lakh accounts a day. Payment bank is doing 75,000 accounts a day and that’s just one account in payment banks. Why does that happen is because you are actually going straight with digital nature of the banking ecosystem that is happening, call it demonetisation or whatever. The reality is that banks have moved into mobile phone therefore the depth in which the mobile industry has penetrated—which is about a billion people having phones, and your mobile number is your account number. The pain of giving a photograph, filling of form, giving your details and records, then the bank will open the account in two days, is all gone now. That is what telecom is offering and not just being disruptive in music and media industry part of it. And among rapidly growing companies, we are becoming a fintech company. And it is rapidly going to grow possibly 1000 crore in the six months of the operation—the rapidness from a telecom side that will come. In the current situation, you will find two non-related expansions that telecom companies have done. One is the music, video and the entertainment part the other part is the fintech part, which is the payment part or the banking part.
“The youngsters that you are today combined with the kind of opportunities that India creates, vis-a-vis the GDP growth and the growth rate, the important part is that you stay in the country to demonstrate what’s actually going to change and be a part of that change”
Genuinely if you look at telecom, one good thing that has happened in the entire world, it is the most penetrated vertical in the world when you look at manufacturing, entertainment, IT, services, media, or if you look at any other that are peripherals of this entire ecosystem. The heart of all these sectors lies in the telecom. The telecom carries the entire networking. You can’t have Facebook without Airtel or vice versa. If you don’t have a good telecom infra you can’t even use Facebook. In many ways it is actually the highway where many events take place. In the portfolio, I spoke about payments bank that is one category in the telecom side and this is one of the most powerfully driven and most exciting zone. If you are looking for infra set-ups, for example let’s say people who want to join the companies like L&Ts—pretty much not those in range but definitely that kind of approach. Therefore, if you are looking for infra as a category for your career to start, you still have a choice to join telecom and get your career started. And you should join telecom because there are multiple things happening in the telecom world, which is not just pure telecom but beyond that.
We spoke about the payment part of it; there is Paytm and other fintech companies that are coming in, which I have spoken about. I think more importantly, I will put forward this one as a big weapon. This will create disruption because you have now Aadhar Card so you are authenticated as citizens of India and it is going to be one of the biggest weapons to surge the banking portfolio. There are many other ways to really look at Aadhar Card integration, be it public distribution of Aadhar Card. Seventy per cent of our subscribers are moving towards the smartphone part of it. India is changing— by 2020, people in India will be more educated, smarter, and more available.
The youngsters that you are today combined with the kind of opportunities that India creates, visa- vis the GDP growth and the growth rate, the important part is that you stay in the country to demonstrate what’s actually going to change and be a part of that change. The trump card India has is the youth that is under 25 years.
Many young countries are rapidly growing ecosystems by technology. India is going to be a $3 trillion economy. I think, all is set for a telecom industry to really utilise the opportunity and therefore combine the last thing I told you—the industry goes to fintech or to digital or to entertainment and telecom. It is a wide spread career portfolio that you can choose from.
We have some of the app ecosystems. The world is now moving towards app ecosystems. On an average, one mobile might have 10-15 apps be it Hike, Paytm, books, or anything else, you will find this only on the mobiles. With all this, mobility becomes your lifestyle; mobility becomes the only equipment in the entire world.
I think one important category—this is more to really make you prepare and make us prepare— somewhere the talent that I represent or the generation that I represent cannot be necessarily going forward. What could be relevant is the digital nature of the manpower that you get. I believe that the disruption is two ways. One is that half of the companies will be run almost by robots, which will wipe out the requirement of physical manpower. The other side is, people who run this part which is the craigslist part of the company, therefore the digital talent is very different. If there was a talent score ever asked to HR it would be, what is the digital IQ of a person rather than the usually used IQ score. That’s the nature of things, which will be visible to us.
Just to give you a perspective as an organisation, you have beliefs that we have been very core to our telecom, that it is a career of multipliers. For example, a new person from Unilever says, “I start in the FMCG sector, I start selling soaps, then I will start selling some shampoos”—it is very incremental in nature. Whereas in a career of multipliers, you will be doing a rural market stint in a prepared environment, which is like an FMCG and you suddenly change to the express category of dealing with corporate clients as one category. The other is that you are dealing with products and services for consumers and then suddenly change to express part. There are many multipliers in terms of giving you the kind of growth you are looking for.
Now if you ask the academia on how are they preparing the students, they will say there is an engineering portfolio and therefore there is specialisation. We talk about core technologies and then they actually give a three months, six months in an academy and industry connect. You ask any HR, they will tell that many organisations start rebooting their entire candidates. And if you ever join Tatas they have induction programme for almost a year, because they really have to prepare you for a Tata culture, Tata set-up, Tata products and services and so on. Therefore, imagine what is important for creating future critical skills. And therefore, I will request you that as today case studies are being digitally available, courses and set-ups which I am sure you will be going through, that is something I want you people to adopt. Even though you are from technical background, that doesn’t stop you from understanding what goes in to those case studies. There are a lot of digital portfolios which you can see. For example, there is a book on how flipkart grew. You can really pickup and know how futuristic you are in terms of knowledge and what is expected.
You will have organisations, which will have specialised people like doctors and scientists. You can’t really be changing them; in any kind of an organisation or an industry like ours it needs more functional leaders than business leaders, therefore there will be more areas where you will need more functional leaders than business leaders
by Vineet K
