As the demand for data science jobs keeps growing, the supply of meritorious candidates is not keeping pace. According to a study we conducted in 2019, around 97,000 data science positions were available to be filled that year alone. It is a travesty then that despite the demand, companies face a lot of challenges when hiring for these positions, and CSS Corp is no different.

However, despite the struggle, the company has managed to attract and retain a significant portion of this talent. Credited largely to its stringent and unique hiring practices, CSS Corp has overcome the challenge of sourcing that small proportion of data scientists dispersed across the nation.

“Being a new-age digital services provider in the B2B space, we pick candidates who have that extra slant for AI, analytics, and automation, instead of the usual coding or testing skills,” says Brijesh Balakrishnan, SVP & Delivery Head – Digital Engineering Services and GIS, at CSS Corp. “In short, we map a career for those who have the inner thrust to learn and grow,” he adds.

So who would be the ideal candidate for a data science position at CSS Corp?

“We look for candidates with a knack for thinking logically and analytically toward solving business problems,” says Balakrishnan. “It’s about fresh thinking, not clichéd answers. An ideal candidate would be one who balances technical forte with soft-skills, right attitude, and personality in a team setting,” he adds.

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As the demand for data science jobs keeps growing, the supply of meritorious candidates is not keeping pace. Market research firm Gartner highlights that just 20 percent of employees currently have the abilities required to succeed in their current and future job roles. In another recent survey, an average of 43 percent of young people said that they were confident that they will need to retrain and have the ability to do so.

As revealed in the Future of Jobs Report 2018 released by the World Economic Forum, ubiquitous high-speed mobile Internet, artificial intelligence, widespread adoption of big data analytics, and cloud technology are only some of the drivers of change that could lead to demand for new skills and create the need for continuous learning for entire workforce, irrespective of their industry or domain.

As uncertain as it could get, the entire world of work has taken a hit with COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses across many sectors have been urged to now operate remotely and quickly adapt to the new ways of working. The role of leaders has become most critical, they have to help the organizations and the entire workforce navigate through this uncertainty looming around the whole ecosystem.

To be able to navigate the complexities of the business ecosystem at present and in the future, as it gets more uncertain, leaders of today and tomorrow have to follow the mantra of ‘Learn, Unlearn & Relearn’.

The need to learn, unlearn & relearn
The metaphor, ‘Change is the only constant’, is as real as it could get in the era of industry 4.0. The onus thus, comes on the business and HR leaders to invest in continuous development of their workforce and ensure that they are always up to date with the in-demand skills.

Anurag Bansal, Senior Director and Business Head, HUGHES Global Education shared, “In recent times, businesses across the globe are increasingly facing complex problems due to rapid changes in technology, disruptions happening through innovation, turbulent market conditions and changing consumer behavior. During such uncertainty, especially, given the complexities COVID-19 pandemic has led to, it is very important to have leaders at the helm who can steer their companies to success in these scenarios.”

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WHILE THERE SEEMS TO BE ADVOCATES OF BOTH FORMAL AND INFORMAL EDUCATION IN THE DATA SCIENCE COMMUNITY, WHAT DOES THE GENERAL HIRING LANDSCAPE SUGGEST?

We may be living unique lives, but there are a few common experiences that tie most of us together. While the instinctive response seems to be what the Covid-19 pandemic has left in its trail, a less grim example would be the chain of events that mark a few decades of our lives – school -> college -> job

While most of these remain unchanged, there has been a growing clamour to rethink education systems as we know it; to one, that both shields learners from the negative effects of new technologies in the workplace, as well as reskills them to prepare for new cross-functional roles that will inevitably be created as a result.

While one way of addressing this talent and labour market issue would be to enrol and improve the quality of education, upskilling in silo would be a more efficient way of achieving this without burdening the formal education system across the world.

Tied to lifelong learning, upskilling through relevant certification is increasingly becoming an accepted norm. But the field of data science is faced with a critical question – can its vast universe be merely acquired through self-study?

Hiring Trends In Data Science

While there seems to be advocates of both formal and informal education in the data science community, what does the general hiring landscape suggest?

While IT services company CSS Corp places an ‘inestimable value’ on a formal academic background, LinkedIn admittedly hires candidates based on skill sets alone, and not necessarily on their educational background.

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California-headquartered CSS Corp, a leading IT services and technology support company partners with HERE Technologies, the global mapping to provide advanced location analytics solutions for their customers. Through the partnership, CSS Corp will ultilise the HERE Platform and products to create and deliver innovative location-based solutions using geospatial data and advanced analytics.

Through this collaboration, CSS Corp says it will leverage HERE’s products and solutions such as HLS, routing, traffic, positioning and tracking fleet telematics for its geospatial solutions to drive contextual intelligence for faster decision-making, scalability, improved efficiency and productivity. Customers will be able to accelerate their businesses and generate new opportunities to gain competitive advantage, leveraging CSS Corp’s bespoke solutions for fleet management, supply chain management and logistics built upon the HERE platform and products.

In the last two years, CSS Corp says it has made significant investments to build its digital solutions portfolio in the geospatial services space in line with its strategy to position itself as the leading provider of customer experience and location-based services to brands globally. Digitalisation has opened new ways for monitoring and getting efficiencies from autonomous vehicles, location-based services, asset and fleet tracking and management offering opportunities on a global scale. CSS Corp says its portfolio of digitally-enabled geospatial services, combined with HERE’s expertise in location-based solutions, presents a great opportunity to address the emerging market needs and drive major disruptions across industry segments with further reduction in costs and better efficiencies.

Speaking on the partnership, Sunil Mittal, executive vice-president, CSS Corp said, “Location-based intelligence is emerging as a critical driver for providing enhanced and personalised services to global consumers. With our portfolio of best-in-class digital solutions in automation and advanced analytics, CSS Corp is in a strong position to deliver compelling business outcomes through this partnership with HERE Technologies. Our experience in product design and development, coupled with our 360-degree geospatial capabilities, will enable us to provide enhanced value to our customers while exploring new avenues of growth and performance.”

“The HERE Technologies partnership is aligned to CSS Corp’s digital vision and comes as a logical extension of our geospatial offerings. We are very excited to bring location analytics solutions built on the HERE Platform to our customers while driving meaningful impact to their businesses,” added Mittal.

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For most corporate employees, the occasional work-from-home option was a relief from having to brave Bengaluru’s infamous traffic. Back then, they had the luxury of household help, and could focus on the official tasks at hand. The coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, though, turned things around. Not only did work-from-home get a more permanent status, but it also meant that they had to work for home as well. And if maintaining a work-life balance was tough earlier, imagine now, when you are doing everything yourself.

Realising that the morale of employees needs some serious upliftment in these gloomy times, most companies have begun conducting fun online activities and exercises.

Fitness classes, music concerts and more to motivate employees

From online mediation, yoga and zumba sessions to virtual music concerts, organisations are doing their bit to ensure their employees’ well being. Shraddhanjali Rao, vice president – HR, SAP Labs India, says that they have been conducting online fitness sessions to give employees a well-deserved fun break from work from home. Their next initiave was also well received. “We conducted a virtual music concert that was attended by 800 employees. Some even joined the session with their families and it was nice to see people bond over music overcoming language and distance barriers,” she says.

Walmart Labs’ employee engagement programme involved some special family members – pets. “On April 11, which was the National Pet Day, associates were asked to share pictures of themselves with their pets. Not only did this help them have some fun, but it also made them feel connected with each other while being socially distant. The initiative had great participation and created a lot of buzz on our internal platforms,” says Sunita Venugopal from Walmart Labs.

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According to Forrester, 72% of businesses say that improving the customer experience is their top priority. A popular study from NewVoiceMedia says that companies lose more than $62 billion due to poor customer service.

Even with improvements in customer support technologies, most customers find it frustrating to get the right service in quick time from the customer support executives. High quality of customer service has become mandatory for companies, as today’s customers can take to the Internet to complain about service brands.

The use of AI technologies can transform the customer service operations, while reducing operation costs and meeting customer expectations. AI enables convergence of human-centric and machine centric intelligence resulting in improved business agility, operational excellence, resilience and bring about better customer service experiences. Google is pushing the use of cloud-based AI platforms for its customer service. According to Gartner, non-voice interactions in customer support is likely to rise from 55% in 2015 to 85% by the year 2020.

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Most of the businesses have gone remote to help fight the spread of COVID-19, but there are still some who are worried about jumping onto the ‘work from home’ bandwagon. We have heard all the cons of remote work – employees don’t get any work done from home, meetings are ineffective and unproductive, it kills the work culture, and so on – it’s difficult to distinguish the actual fact from fiction. Many organizations switched to remote work mode early. While remote work has its challenges, most of them get solved when you focus on keeping your employees engaged.

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IT service provider CSS Corp, announced the opening of its new global delivery centre in International Tech Park (ITPB), Bangalore to house the company’s growing Infrastructure Management and Tech Support Business.

“We are delighted to announce the launch of our new delivery center in Bangalore. Our relationship with Interface Security Systems gave us the impetus to open this new delivery center and our engagement with them will be the first to go live here. This facility will have top-notch engineers and solutions experts delivering innovation to Infrastructure and Tech Support customers.” said Manish Tandon, CSS Corp’s Chief Executive Officer.

With the opening of the new delivery centre, CSS Corp has five delivery centers in India – three in Chennai and two in Bangalore.

CSS Corp and Interface recently partnered to create and deliver an next generation managed IP based technology enabled solutions for networking, security and other enhanced IP Managed Services to selected Interface customers.

Manish further added, “We are strategically expanding our facilities in India to meet the growing needs of our customers and to attract the skilled, diversified and talented workforce available in this region.”

Michael McLeod, President of Interface Security Systems said, “Interface is uniquely qualified to be the one source for providing a bundle of IP Managed Services that simplify customer engagements and our partnership with CSS Corp strengthens and broadens our managed service capabilities”.

Bengaluru: CSS Corp, a new-age IT services and technology support company announced that it has divested Glow Networks to Altruist Technologies Private Limited, a multinational provider of telecom and business process optimization solutions.

The sale was concluded in March 2020. Glow Networks is a network design and deployment services company which was acquired by CSS Corp in 2010.

“Over the last decade, Glow Networks has been integral to CSS Corp’s strategy of providing end-to-end network solutions in complex technology environments. With the upcoming 5G revolution underway, we felt that Glow needed to align with a telecom solutions ecosystem to capitalize on this opportunity,” said Manish Tandon, Chief Executive Officer at CSS Corp.

“Altruist emerged as a suitable parent with its comprehensive suite of telecom products and services, coupled with its diverse geographical presence. We believe the synergies arising from this development augur very well for Glow’s business goals and for its customers,” added Tandon.

“With noteworthy telecom partnerships in more than fifty countries, Altruist’s acquisition of Glow Networks is a strategic step towards diversifying its portfolio. Altruist is a leading telecom-centered solutions provider to more than hundred operators globally,” said Dharamjeet Taunque, the newly appointed CEO for Glow Networks.

“With this acquisition, we aspire to forge our existing expertise in content services, platforms for value-added services, big data and billing, business assurance and enterprise solutions, with network design and 5G deployment capabilities. We have acquired Glow in its entirety; therefore, there is no impact on existing customer relationships or obligations,” he added

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