New
Delhi: As Nitika Wadhwa (TWB Alumni) flips through newspapers, the absence of
advertisements for walk-in-interviews does not bother her at all. After
working with a BPO for a short while and then an NGO, she is today
working as a technical writer. She says she hasn’t seen even a single
person in her function being handed a pink slip even in these
recessionary times.
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I get 5-10 mails which say you’re short-listed for an interview. I’m
getting calls from consultants. A lot of my software engineering
friends ask me about what I have done. They want to do this course and
become a technical writer as it is a comfortable job, more imaginative
more creative” says Nikita.
“There is a requirement of
200,000 to 250,000 people with such skill sets,” says Rakesh Shukla,
founder of technical writing firm, TWB, which also runs a training
institute. Simply put technical writers are people who communicate
technical information in a manner that even non-technical reader can
understand. And Rakesh says that in the next 4 years technical writing
will be roughly a $1.5 billion industry. And even in the current
slowdown, his business has been growing.
There are other
sectors which are doing well. Insurance for instance, which awaits an
increase in FDI limits, will be hiring in big numbers in 2009. Raj
Bawa, MD, James Blake Solutions says: “The maximum hiring would be in
infrastructure and IT still, though in niche areas like Solutions
Architect. Insurance too will be hiring. It is already huge in India.
Mobile Phones, clinical research and general market research are other
sectors that are doing well.”
And the year of global
slowdown has marked a high point for those in the legal profession.
They have seen their work increase. Gurgaon based Law firm UnitedLex,
plans to double its headcount to 1000 in the next six months. Ajay
Agarwal, Chief Solutions Officer at UnietdLex, says: “End of 2008-2009
is a major inflection point. The size of business is doubling over
night”.
According to a study by Forrester, legal outsourcing
to India will touch $4 billion by 2015, employing 79 thousand people.
Those in the industry feel that the figure might be reached even before
that.
TWB is training an entire group of people who were
handed pink slips by a leading IT firm. UnitedLex also has people who
have made a shift and are doing the courses side-by-side. What is
common to all these fields is that with little training the candidates
can acquire new skills and change their profession.