Hyderabad: The winds of change sweeping across the globe driven by factors such as technological change, economic uncertainty, geoeconomic fragmentation, demographic shifts and green transition are rapidly disrupting the job market as well.Pointing to a seismic shift in the global job market between 2025 and 2030, the World Economic Forum (WEF) in its `Future of Jobs Report 2025′ said: “In the next five years, 170 million jobs are projected to be created and 92 million jobs to be displaced, constituting a structural labour market churn of 22% of the 1.2 billion formal jobs in the dataset being studied. This amounts to a net employment increase of 7%, or 78 million jobs.”Back home in India too, this transformation is disrupting traditional sectors and creating new opportunities across various industries.Former Nasscom chairman and Cyient founder chairman BVR Mohan Reddy said technology is making such rapid strides that what you consider as futureskills today may not be relevant even six months or nine months down the line.THE SKILL & TALENT GAPThe biggest worry for industry today is the yawning skill gap across sectors, as per experts. According to Balasubramanian A, senior vice president, TeamLease Staffing, while there’s a critical shortage of skilled machine operators, supply chain analysts, and technicians with automation/IoT exposure in the manufacturing and logistics, healthcare needs an additional 6.5 lakh nurses and midwives and 1.6 lakh doctors by 2030 to meet the threshold of 34.5 skilled health workers per 10,000 population.He also pointed to how the retail and BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sectors are struggling due to limited availability of digitally-savvy sales executives and relationship managers and the construction sector will require approximately 100 million workers by 2030, including 33 million with specialised skills.TECH AND AIThe IT and digital sector faces scarcity of full-stack developers, cloud specialists, and AI/ML engineers, with India requiring one million cybersecurity professionals by 2027, according to TeamLease.Take just artificial intelligence (AI) for instance, where India is witnessing an unprecedented demand but supply is lagging by over 50%, said Krishna Vij, vice president, Teamlease Digital.”India currently has around 4.2 lakh AI professionals, while the demand stands at 6-6.5 lakh. By 2027, the need for AI professionals is expected to reach 1.3 million. This widening skills gap is driving companies to actively seek fresh talent, particularly for roles in AI, machine learning, and data science,” she added.Vij pointed out that with AI roles expected to double by 2027, today’s students have a unique opportunity to future-proof their careers by acquiring skills in AI, machine learning (ML), data science, and cloud technologies.TECH SKILLS, ROTE LEARNING NO LONGER KEYExperts point out that the transformation is not just about skilling and upskilling but about fundamentally rethinking how work is done with focus on developing technical and soft skills while maintaining awareness of industry-specific compliance requirements.The future workforce needs to be adaptable, tech-savvy, and capable of continuous learning to remain relevant in an ever-evolving job market.”If somebody came and asked me a question, say 10 years or five years back, asking what should my kid do in college? I used to give them a one size fits all answer – make him or her an engineer but that’s not true any longer,” Reddy said.”Change has become constant at this point of time and the key lies in our ability to train our children to be adaptable to change and this adaptability will come when we start making sure that they start critically thinking about things, develop the ability to question the status quo and take risks in life. A student just mugging up concepts and vomiting them may do well in exams but will not stand in good stead in future. It’s no longer about teaching programming language but about the ability to keep pace with change,” Reddy added.Agreeing, Vij said: “India’s workforce is at a pivotal moment. While we produce millions of graduates each year, there’s a growing disconnect between what’s taught and what industries actually need. Today’s employers are looking for expertise in AI, data analytics, green technologies, and strong soft skills like adaptability and creative problem-solving. Unfortunately, many students still focus on outdated subjects or rote learning. To bridge this skill gap, we need to rethink our approach by encouraging students to pursue courses aligned with emerging fields and fostering industry-academia collaboration. Only then can India truly unlock its demographic dividend and compete globally.””It’s critical for young learners to move beyond rote learning and embrace problem-solving, creativity, and interdisciplinary thinking. The future workforce needs to be tech-enabled, adaptable, and continuously upskilling to stay relevant. For high school students, early exposure to coding, data literacy, and design thinking can open doors to these emerging fields. Bridging this skills gap isn’t just about jobs, it’s about empowering a generation to lead India’s digital and AI-driven growth,” she added.SKILL GAP OVERRATED?But there are some like Prof Ramesh Loganathan of IIIT Hyderabad who feel the skill gap is an overrated problem. “Do you think many of these IT companies that do bulk hiring are hiring engineers because they need engineers? No, they’re hiring engineers because with an engineering degree it’s easier to get visas. They are hiring for two reasons: aptitude test results showing ability to learn and analyse, and the engineering degree’s acceptability for visas and clients.”Loganathan also lashed out at measures like CBSE introducing coding for school kids. “I don’t agree with it as it’s not a core skill. Understanding maths and fundamental sciences are core skills as are knowing English and social sciences. Understanding tools is important rather than knowing programming. Everybody is trying to ride the bandwagon.”Agreeing, former Nasscom VP and independent advisor TS Viswanathan said the current academic system was designed in 2000 with Y2K in mind but now we are in the digitisation era where the talent pool requires skills beyond coding.”We have perfected it, generating volumes of talent with coding skills with Y2K phenomena in mind. But the industry has moved from the solutioning phase to problem-solving phase that requires alternate skill sets beyond coding – ability to understand customers, business, critical analysis, critical questioning and thinking,” Viswanathan explained.He pointed out that while some universities and premier institutes like IITs and NITs and IIITs are trying to solve the problem and move to a skilling based approach, most are still stuck with the old curriculum.THE GCC PERSPECTIVEIndia’s GCC sector, employing 1.9 million people (roughly 50% in tech roles), is experiencing significant growth. Of these, about 6 lakh professionals are focussed on next-generation digital skills. With the sector projected to grow 25% annually over the next five years there will be demand for about 1.2 million people with skills such in agentic AI, cloud computing, data science, data analytics, among others, said Manoj Marwah, financial services GCC consulting leader, EY.As per estimates, the GCC sector in India, which has over 1700 GCCs, is projected to reach over 2400 GCCs with $100 billion by 2030.”States like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana that have got the largest chunk of private universities are still running with the old curriculum that was created for the year 2000. With about 3,000 GCCs expected to be set up in the next 10 years we need competencies that are beyond just delivery. We need soft skills and entrepreneurial skills, where there is a huge gap. While some have geared up it still takes an average nine months to a year to get the average graduate ready for the job. Can we reduce that to three months or 10 weeks? That’s the task and the gap,” said Viswanathan.”Forget 2047, we need this by 2035 itself. If we don’t produce the alternate kind of engineers required by the country there will be a gap not just for Viksit Bharat but for the global industry as well,” Viswanathan added.FACULTY NEEDS TRAINING TOOViswanathan said the country needs a huge faculty training capacity with more institutions of higher education coming up. While way back in 1988 the National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research was set up in Chennai, industry needs to augment the gap in the reskilling of teachers if the country is to achieve its goal of Viksit Bharat by 2047.