These IT skills can get you 25% hike

NEW DELHI: Niche skills and domain expertise will rule the roost in the information technology sector this year, with salary hikes for specialized skills expected to be more than double the wage increase for an average employee, as the top IT players increasingly move to retain and reward expertise over scale. According to human resource experts, employees in the IT sector will get 8-10% salary hike on average this year, but a top performer who has the right mix of technology and domain skills can expect more than double the average hike, going up to about 25% or even higher in some cases. Even as social, mobility, analytics and cloud (SMAC) and big data skills continue to take centre stage in the IT sector, dynamically changing customer demands require that the average IT professional knows more than just writing code in a programming language. For coders, the relatively new programming languages — Adobe Flash Lite, Python and Objective C — are also picking up momentum, as is the requirement for SAP professionals. Equally important are people who can build mobile apps for different platforms, big data scientists who can make sense of massive amounts of data, and people who can help with quality analysis and testing of the developed solutions. HCL Technologies chief executive Anant Gupta in a recent blog post reiterated the importance of upgrading skills in a recent blog post, drawing a parallel with the apps on smartphones that need to be updated frequently. Quoting LinkedIn co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman he said, "We are all works in progress, irrespective of whether one is a recent graduate or a seasoned professional." The quote sums up how IT companies see themselves in the coming days. For example, proficiency in the popular programming language Java continues to be in demand, but employers are now demanding that these professionals know how to work in innovative development environments such as Scala, Play Framework, Liferay, Spring, Hibernate and so on, said Alka Dhingra, regional manager at recruitment firm Teamlease, which expects average hikes in the IT sector to be 10-11%, and 25% for people with niche skills. "Key talent gets a 1.4 to 1.5 times salary increase compared to the rest. This could be either people with niche skills or high potential talent — the people who have been consistently high performers or have been rated fast-track performers," said Anandorup Ghose, Rewards Practice Leader at Aon-Hewitt. The firm expects the average salary hike in application services companies to be 9.4% this year. The Indian IT industry (including BPOs) employed 3.1 million people last year, out of which only 11-12% were domain specialists, according to industry body National Association of Software and Services Companies. "Companies have no choice but to give double or more than double the average hike to those who constantly upgrade their skills and domain expertise. They command 30-50% premium in the market," said Anuraag Gupta, chief executive at staffing company Magna Infotech. TOI