Indian IT Services Companies Raise Freshers’ Salary After Half A Decade

For the first time in five years, IT technology firms in India have raised fresher employees’ salary to an annual amount of 3.5-3.6 lakh.

In the $167 billion sector, two out of the five biggest companies stated that they have raised salary for entry-level employees. There’s this change because international customers’ demand for freshers who can be trained on digital skills is growing.

Part of this 6-10% rise is also attributed to skill-focused hiring with technology disruption across the industry. Experts declare that for the past 5 or 6 years, entry-level employees have been paid around Rs 3.1 lakh to Rs 3.3 lakh in most firms, and now they intend to upgrade the workforce to support the growing business.

After three disrupted years, IT firms in the country have gone back to engineering schools, promising to recruit thousands of fresh graduates next year. While the Indian biggest tech service company – Tata Consultancy Service – will hire 28,000 graduates this year, HCL Technologies tend to employ 25,000 people, most of whom will be freshers.

Saurabh Govil, Wipro’s chief human resources officer said to ET that their salary in all the insitutes have also grown to Rs 3.5 lakh from Rs 3.2-3.3 lakh for entry level.

Infosys also claimed to have increase annula pay to Rs 3.6 lakh. Moreover, they are offering a salary of Rs 5 lakh and Rs 8 lakh for candiates that have good assessments on performance and skill sets.

Executive of Tata Consultancy Services headquartered in Mumbai refused to make comments. There were not any responses from Cogzinant and HCL Technologies til press time Sunday.

Nvertheless, early this month, TCS said that it doubled the package offer, in which freshers with digital techonlogy skill can get Rs 6.5 lakh. Wipro pay almost Rs 7 lakh to fresh graduates with digital skills.

Candidates that are competent in new-age technologies like machine learning, aritificial intelligent, dataanalytics and cloud computing can be paid Rs 5-8 lak. In this segment, IT companies in India are facing growing competition from international multination firms which are employing for their captive operations in this country.

One of the five largest IT services companies’ executive said that firms are getting more flexible in paying higher salaries for employess with the right skill sets.

According to analysts, even when the rise looks nominal, the firms mainly aim at attrition reduction with slight increas in salary. Kamal Karanth, cofounder of Xpheno, said that Due to winning big deals, all IT serivces companies have begun to increas freshers’ salaries again and the top five are competing for the same skill candidates (TCSNSE 0.78 %, HCL Infosys, Cognizant, and Wipro).

The slight salary growth is important for them to remain their competitive advantage although Rs 4 lakh would make big difference. Yet, it may be costly considering the number of employees they plan to hire.

About this issue, Nasscom commented once big companies start the trend, smaller companies tend to catch up.