IT majors Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys have started training their employees in new skill sets that would be sought after in the near future. India's $150 billion IT services outsourcing industry is adjusting to the changes that are fast setting in because of automation and higher adoption of digital technologies.
While IT companies encourage their employees to learn Apple's programming language, Swift, general purpose high-level language Python and Google's Go over traditional languages like Java or C++, reports measuring the popularity of programming languages tell a different story.
There is one clear trend from the multiple surveys on the most widely used programming language worldwide: Java and Javascript still rule the coding world.
TIOBE Programming Community, which ranks popularity of coding languages based on data from search engine, notes that fundamental languages such as Java, C and C++ are still at the top though their popularity has slipped over the years. The index says high-level languages such as Go, Groovy and data analytics-related R among others are gaining in popularity.
People's Popularity of Programming Language index, which tracks popularity of languages based on tutorial searches, says Python, Javascript, R, and Swift are gaining traction in India though Java and PHP still retain the largest share of search.
Meanwhile, Wipro's CEO Abidali Neemuchwala has put in place an incentive-based system to encourage more than 12,000 software developers to add more programming languages to boost the value of their expertise.
"Clearly, the prediction by many is that 50% of existing skill sets will become obsolete in the coming years. So a company won't be in good shape, if people don't re-skill and learn new skill sets," Saurabh Govil, Chief Human Resources officer, Wipro told Mint.
India's third largest IT services company revealed its latest policy which says programmers who know Apple's programming language Swift and the high-level language Python will enjoy higher pay over their colleagues who know traditional languages like Java.
"We've already ring-fenced the skills which are hot for now. We've started this skill-set mapping exercise to bridge the gap. Now, it is not to say that you don't need understanding of Java. What essentially we are trying to do is to get people to add these top-up skill sets," a Wipro executive told the newspaper.
IT rival TCS said it had trained around 1,00,000 employees in new skills, while Wipro has initiated 10,000 developers into learning new programming languages.
