While salary growth may range from a marginally positive to stagnant or even negative, the increment for some of the "super-specialised" profiles can go beyond 15%.
The Covid-19 pandemic has not only impacted the employment landscape, but has also disrupted the way India Inc rewards its talent.
Employers are cherry-picking profiles and doling out rewards, according to the TeamLease Jobs & Salaries Primer Report 2020.
While salary growth may range from a marginally positive to stagnant or even negative (given the dire situation created by Covid-19), the increment for some of the “super-specialised” profiles can go beyond 15 per cent.
According to the analysis, the profiles that will see an increment in their salaries this year include Hadoop developers in BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) and animators working in educational services.
The other profiles include collection officers in industrial manufacturing and allied areas and digital marketing heads in IT and knowledge services.
“While businesses will stay conservative with salary increments, they have not shied away from rewarding specialised skills,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and executive vice president of the staffing firm TeamLease Services.
She said the pandemic has amplified the importance of skilled profiles in the world of work.
It has brought to the forefront the trinity of skills, performance and rewards.
“The 15 per cent increment that companies are willing to offer to specialised profiles is a testimony of this,” said Chakraborty.
A clutch of job profiles, within each sector, have survived to tell the tale of better than modest salary growth.
These profiles have displayed and will continue to display resilience in the face of the pandemic.
The prominent Covid-proof profiles include supervisors for seed sales and operations support in agriculture and agrochemicals, senior credit analysts in BFSI and back-end support executives in BPO and IT-enabled services.
The other such profiles include product experts in e-commerce field and tech start-ups, healthcare assistants and district managers in the power and energy space.
Profiles such as curriculum administrators in educational services, product developers and test engineers in the IT and knowledge services and digital merchandisers in the retail industry would also continue to display resilience in the face of the pandemic.
The upheaval has led to uneven consequences for salary growth across the spectrum of job profiles.
The most noticeable effects of divergence include customer support associates in e-commerce and tech start-ups, research managers in education services and managers for general trade in the area of fast-moving consumer goods.
Profiles such as fitters in automobile industries, customer care executives in BPO and IT-enabled services, crane operators in the construction and real estate and tour operators in the area of hospitality are expected to witness degrowth.
The sectors which are likely to benefit in terms of business continuity, with the adoption of work-from-home include BFSI, e-commerce and IT and knowledge services.
The sectors with WFH roles, but unlikely to benefit in terms of business continuity, include healthcare and pharmaceuticals, agriculture and agrochemicals, and automobile and allied industries.
As more organisations opt for an asset-light, debt-free model, the trend of rewarding talent based on their skill and outcome is here to stay.
The Covid-19 world or the post-Covid-10 world will be one that appreciates and rewards outcomes.
Chakraborty of TeamLease said filling one's armoury with skills that will help in driving outcomes either through up-skilling or re-skilling is the way forward for talent to stay in demand and to command the desired compensation.
Regarding the hiring and salary trends that had started evolving in FY2019-20, the report said, 6 out of the 17 sectors offered greater than 10 per cent salary growth.
Median salary increment offered was 10.60 per cent.
The top paymasters included sectors such as agriculture and agrochemicals, IT, education, e-commerce and healthcare.
About 82 per cent of all blue-collar profiles commanded a salary growth of 8.5 per cent or more as compared to the 37 per cent of all white-collar profiles that received similar increment levels.
Also, the top cities which offered increments included Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Kolkata.
This edition of ‘The Jobs and Salaries Primer’ has taken into consideration the salary payouts of more than 252,000 candidates across 17 sectors and 9 cities.
