Amid Mass Layoff in Tech, Indian IT Boosts Employment

Tech-giant Accenture has promoted over 60,000 employees in India out of 157,000 promotions that it distributed globally during financial year 2022. Last year, it elevated 80,000 employees, 50% of whom were from India. The number of promotions grew rapidly in the last one year when the tech talent war rose. Accenture added 100,000 people in FY22, taking its employment base to 3,20,000. The compensation increases from December 1 as Accenture follows a September–August financial year. 

Accenture's announcement comes at a time when the service-based WITCH firms are frequently hiring and promoting employees while the FAANG (Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) product-based companies are conducting mass layoffs. Twitter let go 7,500 employees, followed by Meta that fired 11,000.

During the previous fiscal year, Accenture allocated $1.1 billion to learning and development of its staff. Averaging 61 hours of training per worker, its digital equivalent provided over 40 million training hours. It reflects an increase of 27% over FY21. 

Layoffs in the tech sector indicate impending recession as they are typically shielded from daily life problems like during COVID-19 outbreak. During this time, tech companies did not face the wrath of losses while a big chunk of businesses were dying. But, in 2022, most IT firms globally were firing employees to reduce expenses. In addition, they also could not bear the implications of the federal fund rate. In the first half of 2022, WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, and HCL) added roughly 105,000 new employees, with TCS hiring 30,000.

According to Accenture's annual report for 2022, the competitive labour market and high demand for the talents that Accenture's employees possess contributed to rising levels of voluntary attrition. The rate of attrition excluding forced terminations rose from 14% to 19%. With an average salary of $18,821 for the 2021 fiscal year, Accenture had a CEO-to-employee pay ratio of 1,227:1.