From the top of the axis to the bottom, each of us tackled the dreaded pandemic. At its peak, COVID-19 held the world at a standstill. The roads that once swarmed with people and vehicles turned vacant, the parks where children spent the best part of the day appeared ghostly at night, the colleges where students spent their best few couples of years were closed and reduced to a screen at a corner of their rooms.
Billions of lives were affected, millions lost, and the future of families left in uncertainty as the global economy crumbled and millions in the organized and unorganized sector lost their jobs or income source. Amidst all the mayhem, as one of the very few exceptions, the software engineering sector took less toll, as per the data obtained from parts of the world.
What are the reasons that caused the reverse trend in this domain, and what indications it gives for the future? Let us find out.
The Reasons
The prime advantage that software engineering jobs hold over others is that an engineer can set up his cabin anywhere and everywhere, given you have your devices and an internet connection. There are no site visits, offline projects, and supervisions in the name of on-site tasks performed by software engineers. Since office cabins were to homes, meetings transferred to Zoom calls and Google Meet, and workstations moved within the safety of the four walls, adapting to the new normal didn’t take long. Offices were vacant, but work continued.
As people were inside their homes 24 x 7, screen time increased significantly, creating the need for various online services and heavy traffic in the existing ones.
As footfalls in physical stores shifted to visitor count in online stores, companies that operated physically started spending more on technology, mainly by hiring new software developers to handle the traffic and make the user experience smoother.
Online eCommerce sites such as Amazon, Flipkart, Alibaba, IT companies, namely TCS, Microsoft, Apple, Zoom, Shopify, PayPal, platforms like Facebook, Tencent, Netflix, food delivery apps such as Zomato, and Swiggy are some of the few companies that registered humongous growth in the pandemic. What’s common between all these platforms? They all operate online.
Future Prospects
Globally, more than 20% working population lost their job to the pandemic and economic slowdown. However, only 5% of software engineers were rendered jobless. Although it’s nothing to be proud of, still the condition is poor amongst the worsts.
Forbes estimated that job opportunities in the IT sector would increase by 22% by 2029, portraying the bad times might already have ended.
With the economy slowly getting back on track, industries revamped to life, and the workforce moving out of their homes, the pre-COVID times are returning. New businesses are being opened, opportunities diversified, and unconventional norms put into action that has been found effective during the pandemic.
To wrap it up, although the IT sector had been hit in the past 1-2 years, the end of the tunnel is not far.
The growth of companies with an online presence has motivated their offline competitors to shift online, generating the need for more software developers across domains to cater to the demands. With opportunities splashing around, gear up with the latest trends, bring yourself to light, and buckle up for the bull run that you are about to experience.
