50% job seekers enhancing skills in lockdown for better career opportunities: Survey

Close to half of the job seekers utilised the lockdown period to enhance their skills for better career opportunities and long-term career growth, a survey has found.

The lockdown may have paved way for uncertainties in the job market with reports of layoffs and salary cuts but only 10 per cent active job seekers confirmed that they have been laid off, the survey by job portal Naukri.com revealed.

The country imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 25 to contain the coronavirus pandemic that has been extended thrice to May 31.

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The unwelcomed pause in the hiring activities has opened new avenues for job seekers to up-skill themselves and enhance their domain expertise and close to 50 per cent job seekers confirmed that they are utilising this time to focus on self-development, it added.

Data science and analytics courses (22 per cent), followed by digital marketing (20 per cent), and finance and risk management (16 per cent) were amongst the top courses being picked up by jobseekers to up-skill themselves.

The survey also revealed that the job seekers from IT, pharmaceuticals, medical or healthcare and BFSI industries were less impacted by layoffs and salary cuts compared to their counterparts from other industries.

Naukri.com did the survey online among 50,000 active jobseekers to gauge their sentiment around the job market, career progression and increment expectations.

Further, the survey revealed that fear of job loss or salary cut is not the key drivers for a job change, as around 70 per cent of jobseekers are scouting new jobs for better career opportunities followed by 16 per cent due to salary cuts by their organization and 14 per cent due to the fear of being laid off by their company.

Of the 10 per cent of job seekers, who have already been laid off, 15 per cent were from the airlines and e-commerce industry each and around 14 per cent were from the hospitality industry.

Around 13 per cent of the laid-off employees were senior professionals with over 11 years of work experience and were working in either sales (12 per cent), HR and admin (12 per cent), marketing (11 per cent) or operations or supply chain (11 per cent) roles, it said.

The survey gives a broad direction of maintaining caution towards the future outlook of the job market. While only 10 per cent job seekers confirmed that they have been laid-off as per the survey, almost 34 per cent fear that a layoff is imminent.

"The Step-Up' initiative by Naukri.com aims to facilitate hiring of the laid off segment by improving their discovery by the recruiters and expense less access to their CV's. On the positive side, it is heartening to see that more than 50 per cent of jobseekers are focusing on upskilling for better career opportunities and that is a sure-shot way of long term career growth,” Naukri.com Chief Business Officer Pawan Goyal said.

On the salary cut front, one-third job seekers indicated that salary cuts have not yet been announced but are most likely soon.

In the most impacted sectors such as airlines, hospitality, and e-commerce almost half of the job seekers indicated that salary cuts have been announced in their companies, it added.