Capgemini will add over 60,000 employees in India this year

French technology firm Capgemini will look at adding about 60,000 new employees in India this year – higher than it did in 2021 – as demand for digital-led solutions rise, its chief executive officer Ashwin Yardi has said.

“We are globally about 325,000 employees and half of them are in India, and we continue to see good headcount growth,” Yardi said. The new hires will be a mix of fresher hiring and lateral talent, with a focus on emerging areas like 5G and quantum, he said.

Capgemini had launched a 5G lab in India last year in partnership with Ericsson. It is seeing a lot of traction, Yardi said. “We’ve been working with some of the global and Indian service providers to build industry use cases on 5G,” he said.

Capgemini in India grew faster than the reported growth for the group in 2021, and Yardi said the demand outlook for the rest of the year remained strong, fuelling the hiring drive.

The company has also put in place a series of initiatives like quarterly promotion cycles and partnerships with educational institutes to create specific skills.

Last month, Aiman Ezzat, group CEO of Capgemini, had said that going forward, India would play a bigger role in managing operations for the firm. It would also look at developing leaders in India who could then go on to lead teams globally, he had said.

Emerging technologies like quantum, 5G and metaverse are expected to be big growth drivers going forward, and Capgemini is setting up labs to build solutions around these technologies for global customers.

“A lot of the new generation technology skills are being incubated in India or are being built from here,” Yardi said.

Similarly, Capgemini has an academy for cloud and AI where it is building specific competencies, and for cybersecurity. “We see trends across all of these…some, like cloud and data have become more mature,” Yardi said. “We will see more business use cases coming with a broader focus on metaverse and quantum.” SightsIn Plus