for over a year upto the middle of 2022 technology employees were on a roll lots of jobs multiple offers in hand sharp rise in salaries and then as the global macroeconomic trends changed and the ukraine war hit the biggest technology companies started laying off funding for startups shrunk and job growth in india too slowed sharply can india avoid such volatility in the job market and create a more resilient workforce can we ensure 2023 does not become a dead year for jobsthat was our discussion on our webinar last week with some of the countrys leading hr professionals and these are questions that will be discussed as the it industry gets into its flagship event the nasscom technology leadership forum in mumbai todaythere are many things that are going well for india already sangeeta gupta svp chief strategy officer at nasscom noted that the layoffs in india have not been as significant as in the us and there are still very good opportunities if you are a techie today even in the us she said tech unemployment is at record lows the graphic in this pages top panel also shows thatmanoj shikarkhane chro at ltimindtree said the past 23 decades have shown that indian it has always benefited from a slowdown or recession in the us because global companies tend to increase outsourcing during difficult times but there are two issues that need to be addressed one is that technologies are changing far more rapidly than they ever were and many new technologies are emerging and that means talent needs to reskill ever more rapidly the second is that the employability of a significant section of indian college talent remains lowa new cultureeveryone on our panel noted that extraordinary efforts are being put by their companies and the industry into bringing a learning culture to employees thirukkumaran nagarajan vp head of hr at ibm indiasouth asia said it has become absolutely critical for companies to have a culture that intuitively encourages people to continuously learn in the absence of that he said it would force companies to hire externally which would be prohibitiveif you have 1000 open positions the hiring manager will default say ill hire from the market thats what happens most of the time and then you outpay for sometimes mediocre talent and a lot of people go for these very big salaries and they eventually cap out he said the right way to deal with this he said is to fill a third of the positions through internal promotions another third by deploying reskilled people those who have gone beyond their day jobs to learn new skills and only the remaining third should be hired externally but doing this nagarajan said requires a culture of learning and building a workforce management system that helps you identify the skills know where your talent pools are companies need to invest in these internal technologies to identify these people reward learners