Are IT companies training for yesterday while firing for tomorrow?

Global technology is unstable as it is reported with reports of several layoffs in big companies such as TCS, Accenture, Microsoft, and Infosys. Thousands of Indian and other overseas IT employees have been dismissed by companies over the past three months, with the reason being cited as a lack of skills. Companies such as TCS have publicly fired thousands of employees but it is said that the actual count might be significantly larger since they are rapidly moving to cloud-based and artificial intelligence systems.

Despite their huge investment in AI, giant players such as Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle are eliminating traditional positions. This brings up the pressing issue of whether these companies are preparing to employ talents of the future when they are training for the past. Better still, are their learning and development departments not preparing their people with the skill of tomorrow due to the wave created by automation?  Are IT companies curating skilling programs right or are their L&D departments lagging behind disruption? Are IT companies really crafting their skilling programs to fit a new era or are they unwittingly planning the past and trying to survive the future?

The layoff–skilling disconnect

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in the last few months affirmed that it was laying off approximately 12,000 of its employees, about 2% of its workforce because of the change in demand of its business and the integration of AI. This announcement created a lot of speculation and anxieties following the rumours in the social media which had exaggerated the figures up to 80,000 layoffs. There was a major employee opposition against the layoffs due to the criticism of the National Industrial Transport Employees’ Union (NITES), which accused the layoffs of breaching labour norms. In the meantime, Microsoft, which is also facing layoffs, focused on upskilling, calling on the remaining workers to acquire new AI-driven skills in order to keep up with the times. This contradiction is disturbing. Although businesses are pushing skilling as a strategy to the future workforce, it is still the layoff that is employed first-line-control, making it a question of whether training is indeed keeping up with the continuous disruption AI is causing the IT industry. 

Although the significance of upskilling grows progressively in the contemporary rapidly changing workplace, large-scale corporate learning initiatives have been still way below the expectations. The most ambitious and high-spending projects in a row, the ones aimed at reskilling hundreds or thousands of employees simultaneously, are stalled in their initial stages such as planning and activation. And, the worst part, an appallingly small number of these programs have grown to the point of being able to quantify any tangible success. The Harvard Business Review narrows down this issue by noting that although a lot of companies understand the necessity of reskilling, not many do it well and that even their best projects are not scaled enough to create positive transformations. The fact of the matter is that, with all the hype about AI-powered personalised learning, microlearning, and the seamless integration of skills-building into the working processes, most organisations continue to operate on outdated and classroom-based training or, tick-box training. This delusion of expectation and reality constrains actual ability to be agile in skill and the consequence is a number of companies that are vulnerable to technological disruption as time goes by.

The state of L&D (Learning and Development) in 2025

The future of learning and development in 2025 is a paradox. Although there is still focus on learning as the core of organisational success as demonstrated in reports such as LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2025, the true situation is not the same. Although L&D is said to be strategic, training and development occupies between 1 and 2% of revenues in most companies. According to the HR.com survey, this is a worrying situation, as only 8% of organisations have an AI-specific reskilling plan. L&D leaders are battling with shrinking budgets and the requirement to demonstrate the apparent return on investment, according to the Hemsley Fraser Impact Survey. This dissonance becomes further apparent when it comes to comparing the hype around AI-driven personalised learning, microlearning, and flow-of-work skilling and what most companies actually practice, which is primarily the use of traditional classroom-like training and compliance checklists. In spite of all the hype surrounding the way of digitising workplace learning, the majority of organisations appear to be trailing and playing a game of comparison between what is desirable and what is actually being done. The existence of this disconnection poses a significant question: are organisations really serious about future-proofing their employees or are they merely giving lip service to the concept of learning whilst adhering to the old-fashioned models?

Skill mismatch or skilling failure?

The official cause of the wave of layoffs in Indian IT firms such as TCS has been a skills mismatch with the leadership stating that many workers lack the skills required to work on the current agile and AI-driven, digital projects as documented by Times of India and Reuters. Other frustrations that have been experienced by the employees such as being instructed to learn python and yet the projects required cloud security skills. Concurrently, other unions such as NITES have complained that layoffs were against the labour norms thus leading to massive employee opposition to job losses. Unlike TCS, in the case of Microsoft, where layoffs were involved, its strategy also involved encouraging the retained employees to upskill and acquire AI-centered capabilities, which is a more proactive attitude to learning. The scholarly literature such as a 2025 study on polarisation in the labor market on “arxiv” notes that AI has the tendency of complementing human skill but also increasing the risk of the middle and low-skill jobs - two of the most prevalent groups in the IT workforce of India. These trends imply that despite possibly eliminating layoffs, AI disruption would hasten them instead of eliminating them without swift and essential reforms in their learning and development approaches, which leaves India especially susceptible by its workforce structure and the pace of reskilling.

The article by Venkat Ram Reddy Ganuthula and Krishna Kumar Balaraman, 2025, Arxiv, titled Skill-Based Labor Market Polarisation in the Age of AI provides valuable critical perspectives on the polarisation of the labour market in India and the United States because of AI-driven automation. The study identifies that the labour market of India is extremely focused on the low-skill level of employment that is at a great risk of being replaced by automation in contrast to the US where work is more distributed across the skills pool. India has also higher wage inequality which is aggravated by the threat of automation, and leaves someone doubly vulnerable because of lower AI preparedness. This is a structural complication that makes the high number of IT employees in India, most of them doing mid- and low-skilled positions, especially vulnerable to AI technologies. The paper highlights the fact that India faces a risk of increasing the rate of job loss instead of mitigating job losses unless it redesigns its learning and development programs, particularly those designed to create AI-complementary skills and talents. 

India’s unique pressure point

​​India has a special status of being the back-office of the world, which has approximately 1.9 million employees working in Global Capability Centres (GCCs), and millions of IT services. According to the National Association of software and service companies (NASSCOM), by 2027 India is estimated to require 2 million AI-skilled professionals in order to maintain its IT edge. But when the Learning and Development (L 2 D) initiatives do not keep up with this demand, India will lose its competitiveness. Large IT companies, such as TCS, Cognizant, and Wipro, have made large scale skilling programs, including the TCS Talent Cloud, the Cognizant Synapse, and Wipros Lab45. The following is a comparison between the promise of these programs and their present reality:

• TCS Talent Cloud: Veterans personalisation and scalability of learning do not move beyond base skills in all employees.

• Cognizant Synapse: Intended to combine ongoing AI and cloud training but experiences loopholes in implementation and quantifiable redeployment effectiveness.

• Wipro Lab45: Emphasises immediate upskilling of the emerging technologies, yet it experiences a high turnover and is still behind the changing customer needs.

Although these programs represent industry goodwill, reports have indicated that a significant number of employees who have been trained under these schemes continue to lose their jobs, which shows that there is no connection between the promise of skilling and the reality of changing the workforce. It may not be able to satisfy the AI-driven future demands unless India accelerates and re-designs L&D at scale to ensure that the large pool of IT talent can keep up.

The Future of L&D: Strategic or Sidekick?

 Is L&D strategic business enabler or a sidekick, which is considered to be a cost center? The CIPD and Training Magazine reports point to such promising trends as microlearning, the emergence of hybrid skills that combine technical and soft skills, and the integration of learning into everyday work processes. These strategies will ensure that learning is more dynamic, practical, and business oriented. Nevertheless, even with this favorable trend, the gaps are still huge. The results of HR.com are that the number of companies that have completely implemented AI-based personal learning platforms is only 16% , this is a clear signal that the vast majority of organisations are not ready to unlock the potential of modern technology in L&D. Such a deficiency leads to a significant debate: In case L&D operations fail to adapt and become more proactive, more innovative, and better aligned with the changing needs of the business, laying off as the standard reaction to the disturbance of the workforce may remain the main option. Put differently, companies who fail to turn learning into a strategic growth engine will fail to take advantage of the opportunity to retain and up-skill talent that will be important in future resilience.

The big question

AI never laid you off, outdated skilling did! The future of these companies depends on the fact that Learning and Development turns into a strategic nerve center of transformation, as opposed to being a cost center. L&D is the pillar of business agility and innovation in many organisations that connect employee development to the business. Whether the companies arm their employees with the skills they had yesterday or train them properly to tackle the demands of tomorrow, is the sole factor that makes the difference between redundancy and relevance in the eyes of employees. Whenever L&D becomes a primary force of changing skills, it can restructure careers, bridge skills gaps, and make organisations remain competitive in a swiftly developing world. However, in the absence of this change, layoffs will be the fallback solution to disruption and workers will be left vulnerable and companies will be looking to scramble.

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