While marking the sharpest employment shift in India’s information technology sector in a decade, Global capability centres (GCCs) are hiring technology talent at more than four times the pace of IT services firms.
Techtonic Shift In Indian IT Industry
When it comes to GCCs, they are expanding headcount by 18-27% year on year which is much higher compared with 4-6% for IT services, as per the data revealed from staffing firm TeamLease Digital.
Both of them together employed nearly 2 million people as of which is much up from 1.2 million in 2022, hence creating about 300,000 jobs annually.
Contrasting the same, IT services have added only 25,000-40,000 employees a year on a net basis during this period.
Moving ahead, the CEO of TeamLease Digital, Neeti Sharma said, “This is the sharpest divergence we have seen. There is over a 20% difference in hiring growth.”
Further adding, “GCC demand is concentrated in AI, cloud, cybersecurity and product engineering – areas that require deeper domain expertise.”
We need to understand here that this acceleration is being driven by global companies, through GCCs, internalising many key tasks that once fuelled India’s outsourcing boom.
The good part is that this trend will continue in the coming years as more multinationals set up GCCs as expected by the experts.
Continuous Expansion In GCCs
The co-founder of ANSR, a firm engaged in building and managing GCCs, Vikram Ahuja said, “Companies are prioritising in-house, high-skill, multi-disciplinary teams inside GCCs. Work that requires IP ownership, speed, security and domain depth is increasingly being internalised rather than outsourced.”
He further noted that almost 90 new companies have set up GCCs in India this year, while more than 150 existing centres have expanded.
Adding, “This translates to around 160,000 new GCC jobs in FY25, and FY26 is projected to cross 200,000. Meanwhile, India’s top five IT services firms added barely 11,000 net employees in the first nine months of FY25.”
It is noteworthy here that the IT services companies in the country still employ about double the number of people working in GCCs.
Although, this gap is shrinking rapidly as GCCs emerge as the primary engine of tech job creation in the country.
GCCs – Primary Driver Of Technology Hiring
The CEO of staffing firm Quess Corp, Kapil Joshi said, “GCCs are the primary drivers of tech hiring in India. IT services have seen only a mild rebound from last year slowdown.”
This is witnessed in the numbers as GCCs contributed more than 100,000 of the 120,000 net new tech jobs added in FY24 and FY25, on the other hand IT services added only a fraction, Joshi stated.
In the coming future, Ahuja expects GCC hiring to remain on an upward trajectory, saying,“The gap with IT services will continue to widen.”
When it comes to GCCs, they are also set to increase fresher hiring and expand into Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities while traditional IT services firms are seeing much slower growth.
Indian IT Major, TCS which is also India’s largest IT services firm, has announced their plans to reduce its workforce by about 2%, affecting over 12,000 jobs globally, under a broader organisational realignment.
Similarly, several other traditional IT services firms are also conducting “silent layoffs, where actual exits exceed officially reported numbers, according to the industry watchers.
It appears that the workstreams are moving into GCCs include AI and ML development, cloud engineering, cybersecurity operations, platform modernisation, product engineering, digital customer experience, and core data pipelines.
This simply means that GCCs are being positioned as enterprise innovation hubs rather than back-office centres.
Coming to the compensation trends, it underlines the demand for high-skill talent.
Experts say that GCCs, on an average, pay 15-25% more than IT services firms for mainstream engineering roles and 30-40% more for AI, GenAI and advanced ML roles.
Besides this, they are also seeing stronger offer-to-join ratios of 60-70% as compared to the IT services firms which continue to face drop-offs.
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