Rising moonlighting of IT/ITES professionals in India

Abstract

In the era of Industrial revolution 4.0, both the developed and developing economies are transforming everyday when newer technologies keep coming in and pose threats to the traditional jobs. The obsoleted skills are wiped out from the market rapidly and being replaced by the new age expertise. This makes the IT workforce look for various alternatives for their survival and future security. This has been investigated many times by various analysts that jobs are being eradicated quickly in the IT industry but only a few have critically examined the motivations & challenges one faces while working with these dynamics of this industry. This paper aims to bridge this gap. A secondary data analysis from various real-time case studies and research reports has been done to gain prolific insights into the issue. It has been found that although the speed of workforce cut-down with big players in the market has been exponential but parallely it is noted that people have started adapting to the new scenarios with the help of coping strategies like skill diversification, skill enrichment, planning and working towards entrepreneurship and freelancing for personal goals. This is giving rise to a new style of multi-jobbing which is also referred to as moonlighting in the context of emerging human resource development. In this industry, freelancing is being extensively used to do moonlighting due to technology facilitation.