The sombre spell cast on the job market in 2017 by the dual impact of demonetisation and the rollout of the goods and services tax (GST) has been broken, as 2018 promises to start on an upbeat note for job aspirants.

Staffing and executive search firms peg the number of new jobs that will be up for grabs at over 5 lakh this year in sectors spanning, manufacturing, energy & utilities, technology, e-commerce, financial services, small & micro businesses, FMCG/durables, pharma and healthcare & lifesciences.

"With stability returning to the economy, the hiring outlook for 2018 is optimistic with a focus on moving up the value chain of skills," said Paul Dupuis, MD and CEO, Randstad India.

"We expect about 3.75 lakh high-skilled and new-age jobs to be created across the IT, manufacturing, pharma and energy sectors through 2018," he added.

According to Randstad estimates, manufacturing will create 2 lakh formal jobs, as several defence, heavy industry and electronics assembly units are expected to go live this year, generating demand for R&D/production engineers and operations professionals.

The renewable energy sector will generate over 20,000 technical jobs across the manufacturing (solar & wind energy), generation and distribution side.

The IT sector is expected to add 1.5 lakh jobs on the back of niche skill sets such as blockchain, cybersecurity, machine learning/AI, data sciences and analytics.

With several drugs slated to lose patent protection in the next three years, Indian pharma companies focussed on the overseas generics market will see an increase in the number of R&D, quality and compliance professionals with 5,000 new jobs.

Specialist staffing firm Xpheno pegs the number of jobs to be created this year at 2.65 lakh topped by financial services, which will ride the wave of fin-tech and NBFCs to generate over 1.25 lakh jobs for tech and sales professionals.

E-commerce, backed by a stable funding ecosystem, will generate 60,000 jobs, as will global captives of multinationals, which will offset the stagnant demand in IT services.

Additionally, FMCG/durables will generate 20,000 jobs backed by demand from Tier-2 and -3 cities.

Small and micro hyper-local businesses, which took a beating in 2017, are hiring again this year.

"We had just 15,000 jobs available on our platform last year as demonetisation broke the backbone of these hyper-local businesses," said Ashish Agarwal, founder of Worknrby, an online job search platform.

"With stability coming back, 2 lakh jobs will be available this year," he added.

Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder, TeamLease Services, said, "campus hiring, which was subdued for last three years, is up 10-20 per cent starting October/November 2017, with pre-placement offers increasing by up to 30 per cent at IIMs-A, B, C and up to 20 per cent in Tier 1 and 2 institutes like NMIMS, IIM-Trichy, SIBM. IITs have received 25 per cent more pre-placement offers from core sector employers in manufacturing, petroleum, infrastructure and mining."

Some of the key IT roles in demand are cybersecurity analyst, network analyst, machine learning engineer, cloud engineer, technical support specialist and vulnerability assessment manager, said Pradipto Chakrabarty, Regional Director, CompTIA India.

 29 Jan 2018, 05:12 AM