In the post recession strategic times, the Information Technology (IT) industry is facing a tricky scenario in which quality of talent within companies has increased, while quality of skills available in the job market has dwindled.

This perception surfaced at a national level Human Resources (HR) meet here this week, where top representatives of the industry deliberated on the theme 'Opportunities & Challenges in IT Industry-Post Recession'.

The focus of the meet was to understand the changing needs of the industry and its expectations from the educational institutions, which the participants felt would be called upon to bridge the gap between the required talent and available manpower for the IT sector, which underwent difficult phase in the last one year.

"Last one year has been a year of acid test for industry in general and IT sector in specific, where India has been leading. Still the revenues of India's business and technology services companies have grown from USD four billion in 1998 with a short dip in 2009 and is expected to rise upto USD 60 billion a year by 2010 as per National association of Software and Services companies (NASSCOM) survey," said Cognizant technologies Vice President Sudhendra Chatterjee.

The discussion during the conference revealed that business would no longer run on the old rules, but "new out of the box solutions" more comprehensive efforts, innovative thinking, new skills and competencies would be required to grow and prosper.

"This year with required correction done in the economy, IT industry is looking forward to enhance the business by focusing on talent acquisition after recession and to cross the difficult road ahead," commented Vikas Joshi Managing Director, Harbinger Systems.

The participants felt that the demand for both the quantity and the quality of talented employees will grow worldwide with companies that have fired employees in the past already feeling the pinch, as they do not have enough bandwidth to execute.

During the economic downturn, companies were able to downsize and also restructured the employees compensation (mostly by decreasing) to stave off financial losses. Only those employees were retained who proved their worth.

These survivors got the opportunity to handle a variety of tasks that further sharpened their skills and made them multi-skilled. Thus, overall quality of talent has increased.

At the same time, those who were out of job lost this opportunity to show their skills in a new challenging environment. "Adding to our woes, slashing of training and development budgets has led to a depletion of the number of skilled employees within the companies," the participants noted.

"Such steps from companies have created an altogether tricky scenario. The quality of talent within the companies has increased while the quality of skills available in job market has dwindled. As business positions for recovery, the first thing that is needed is to refresh the vision and begin to paint a picture of what the new business landscape may look like," it was felt.