Watch: Business Matters: Whose market is it? Employee or employer?

A look at the high attrition levels in the banking sector, and salary trends in IT

Young banking sector staff are quitting in droves, salaries and increments offered by industry seem paltry. At the same time, youth in general are finding it difficult to find jobs.

Are these dots that we can connect at all or are they all data points that happen at random with no link to each other?

The International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024 released earlier this month showed that youth around the world, not just in India, are finding it tough to get a job. 

The report found that in low-income countries, only one in five young adults aged 25 to 29 manage to find a secure paid job — a job with a paying employer and a contract greater than one year in duration. The share of young adults in permanent paid work in high-income countries was at 76% in 2023. 

India as a lower middle income country would fall in the 34% range. And that percentage is a troubling sign, given the number of graduates we have coming out of colleges each year and how young our population is compared with the rest of the world.

Another interesting data point in today’s episode comes from a Bloomberg report that showed that young people in India’s banking sector are quitting in droves. The attrition rate (or number of people per 100 leaving a company’s or a sector’s workforce annually) for banks in India tops 50% regularly at the fresher level.  We spoke to Kamal Karanth of Xpheno, a specialist staffing company, and he says high attrition is likely related to the issue of mental preparedness for the job profile, esp if it’s a sales job. 

Script and presentation: K. Bharat Kumar