World Youth Skills Day Special
July 15, 2021- As we observe the World Youth Skills Day today, metrics benchmarking and market intelligence firm, UnearthInsight, has released a report “Unused Potential of India’s People with Disability (PwD) Workforce” highlighting the untapped potential of People with Disability (PwD) workforce in India.
The report reveals that, out of a population of 1.3 billion, India has an overall PwD talent of 3 Crores, around 50% of which i.e 1.34 Crore is employable. However currently only 25% of employable PwD talent (around 34 lakh) is employed across sectors. People with Disabilities face more severe health and infrastructural challenges and yet data shows their capabilities of resilience which can help them contribute to India’s growing need of skilled labor.
Technology and Retail are leading the way in skilling and creating employment opportunities for PwD talent pool. Organized Retail sector employs over 13,000+ PwD professionals whereas 8,000+ PwD professionals are employed by Technology (IT services, Product/GCC) sector.
The Banking & Financial Services Sector is an emerging employer for PwD talent wherein SBI is the largest employer of PwD in the back-office and front-office jobs.
The country has a potential worker bandwidth of 3,40,000 Non-Tech graduates like BA/BCom, Polytechnic and Diploma who could be skilled and brought into mainstream services sector and knowledge industry to push per capita income. Another 17,000 PwD students who graduate in Engineering/computer science and aligned streams, out of which the IT services sector employs around 8,000 PwD employees whereas Software product has around 5,500 and the Alternate Tech Talent has around 3,500 PwD talent. TCS and Accenture are larger employers of PwD talent in India’s IT services sector while SAP and Microsoft lead the high skilled tech PwD talent in Software Product industries in India.
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Key Drivers to Skill, Train and Employ PwD Talent
- 98% Retention/Lowest Attrition
- Average Tenure of 12+ years against 3 years for non-PwD talent
- Higher Innovation Quotient among Neurodiversity and ASD
(Autism System Disorder) talent
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The UnearthInsight study found less than 2% of IT, 3% of Organized Retail and less than 5% of BFSI talent is actively seeking jobs among PwD hence IT, Software Product and KPO/BPO industry struggles to hire ready talent from market. This is a perfect opportunity and time for knowledge industry to partner with government & skilling companies to build structured “Skill to Employ” programs for various streams and help industry leverage the potential of PwD talent.
The report further reveals that within the Technology sector, Bengaluru leads in the list of cities which employs the most of PwD category workforce due to PwD headquarters of IT services firms like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, and other Tier II firms. Also, NGO, CSR and Recruitment partnerships are driven from Bangalore to build skilled tech talent pool across technologies for hiring and deployment. The source of hiring PwD talent in technology sector is largely through secondary channels such as NGOs, Virtual Summits, Disability portals, etc.
Says Gaurav Vasu, Founder and CEO UnearthInsight: “Contemporary business strategy towards the expansion of the talent pool is focused on realizing the ideals of diversity and inclusion at the workplaces. It is a well-established fact that PwD workforce is more resilient and committed, today firms are more interested at investing and engaging in creating a skilled labor force which comes from diversifies background and is not restricted to tier 1 cities. However, there is a long way to go, as India is sitting on a huge PwD talent pool that can play an important role. With the right policy and strategy shift, there is a real chance that we work towards raising employability rates among the PwD population."
On other finer details, the report says, the Intersectional figures comparing cities and gender division shows that almost every city employs 0-15% of women (PwD) as compared to 85-100% men PwD workers. On the lines of kind of disabilities, PwD professionals in Tech has Multiple Disabilities including 23% are Blind and Low Vision followed by Hearing Impairment and Locomotive at 21%, and 20% respectively. Furthermore, 45% of PwD professionals work as Infrastructure Support Services such as Support engineer, Helpdesk specialist, Technical support i.e., L1/L2/L3 and Implementation & support role while 35% work on Functional Testing, Automation Testing, Manual Testing Roles. Only 8% of PwD professionals work on Microsoft, SAP, Oracle or IBM application development roles, Migration Consultants working on RFPs/ SOWs, Service management, Integration/operations.
UnearthInsight delivers critical market information to drive decision insights for CXOs and equips them with actionable insights to understand the opportunity and prepare the market strategy.