Cognizant To Lay Off 7000 Employees From Their Current Roles

The New Jersey-based tech giant Cognizant to lay off as many as 7000 jobs in the next few quarters and exit content moderation business. It will impact another 6,000 employees as it begins a strategic restructuring to cut jobs.

Cognizant in a post-earnings conference call with the analysts, said it would remove 10,000-12,000 mid-to-senior employees from their current roles, and resell and redeploy about 5,000 those impacted, according to a news report in the national publication.

“The gross reduction is expected to lead to a net reduction of approximately 5,000 to 7,000 roles (about 2% of the company’s total population),” company executives said.

The company has also planned to exit its content moderation business for clients such as Facebook.  The company has come in significant scrutiny for the working environment of the moderators and the impact of the work on their mental health.

“Exiting this area will impact an additional approximately 6,000 roles worldwide, though the company intends to work with its partners to explore ways to transition the roles to alternative vendors, thereby reducing the impact to associates,” company executives said.

It may be noted that the exit is also likely to impact revenue in the company’s Communications, Media and Technology segment, with the ramp-down in work expected to be over the next one to two years.

Last month in September, it was reported that the Cognizant Technology Services’ planning to hire 500 sales executives to ramp up digital technology-based services. Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries said that the company would reap the benefits of the new hires in the next few quarters, although most are expected to come from companies with niche skills.

In August this year, the company looked at another round of layoffs as part of its strategy to cut costs and reduce spending. It was reported that the company is undergoing a widespread restructuring under its new CEO Brain Humphries.

Cognizant had 288,200 staff as of June 30, 2019, up 7 percent from 268,900 a year earlier and 2,81,600 at the end of 2018. Out of this 1,94,700 or nearly 64 percent were in India, the company said in its annual report for 2018.―Times Now