IT-enabled services: Mixed fortunes

Though a lot of people with IT-related skills move to jobs in IT-enabled services, these jobs do not need core IT skills. As the name suggests, these jobs depend heavily on having an IT infrastructure in place. We are not discussing people who run these businesses, but those who are employed in these.

Medical transcriptionists

Medical transcription is about getting voice dictation files from doctors and hospitals abroad and transcribing them for documentation and legal purposes. The initial hype surrounding this has died down, and it is unlikely that there would be significant growth in this area.

The long-term prognosis is a decline in potential, as voice technologies mature (voice-to-text technologies will be able to create documents from the dictation with a reasonable level of accuracy, thus eliminating the first level of transcribers, while retaining the need for the more skilled ones), and other cheaper English-speaking economies get into the act.

Thus, for the novice, our advice is to move out of this segment in the medium to long term. For career growth, veterans and intermediates could also do well to keep a look out for fresh options.

Call-center executives

These handle customer calls for various organizations, often from across the globe. The basic requirements are for language and customer interaction skills. In the long term, this would emerge as a reasonably good start-of-career option. Why only start-of-career? Because we do not foresee the potential for much career growth in this. But then, the segment is in its infancy, and things may change.

Moves from here could be into the service industry, particularly hotels, etc or even marketing (and tele-marketing) jobs.

Data-entry operators

This profession catered to the original IT-enabled service, though at that time nobody recognized it as such.

The position of DEO will remain in organizations, but for obvious reasons, do not expect any long-term career growth in the position. But you could pick up skills in allied areas like database handling and logistics handling and move to other divisions in the organization, like MIS or administration.

Krishna Kumar