Recently, about 400 senior executives of Cognizant accepted the company's voluntary separation package. Cognizant had announced this programme for directors, associate VPs and senior VPs a few months ago.
French IT services major Capgemini had reportedly asked over 35 VP, SVPs, directors and senior directors to leave in February.
According to sources, nearly 1,000 Infosys employees at job level 6 and above (group project managers, project managers, senior architects and higher levels) are expected to be asked to leave.
Large IT services companies are all in the process of laying off employees on a scale not seen since the 2008-10 downturn. Those taking the hit first are mid- and senior-level professionals — those with 10-20 years of experience.
Layoffs in the senior slab in the tech sector have been predicted by the Experis IT Employment Outlook Survey from Experis IT-ManpowerGroup India for October 2017-March 2018. The survey found very little demand for senior-level IT executives among employers.
In the survey, merely 3% of employers wanted to hire people at the senior level. The highest demand was seen for candidates in the 0-5 experience slab, with nearly 56% of the 500 employers surveyed displaying an intention to hire people in this group. Another 41% wanted to hire those at the middle level (5-10 years).
A major reason for layoffs at the senior level could filling up of vacancies internally rather than going for external recruitment. Another reason is automation taking away traditional team lead jobs becoming redundant.
For example, project leaders are increasingly being rendered superfluous as automation kicks in big-time and newer, more specialised roles emerge in India's $160-billion IT industry.
Peter Bendor Samuel, CEO of IT consulting firm Everest Group, said industry growth has slowed and the 'arbitrage first' segment (traditional IT services) is in secular decline. "When this is added to the pyramid factory model, which requires new freshers to be brought in every year to keep cost low, it results in an excess of more experienced employees," he said in an interview to ET in May.
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