The banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector has been a strong pillar of the Indian economy. In recent years, it has undergone a rapid transformation redefining the way institutions deliver services. Driven by advanced tech integration – AI, Blockchain, IoT, etc., organisations are reshaping their traditional approach to work and witnessing an increased demand for tech talent with specialised tech skills in the present market landscape.

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As BFSI’s digital transformation progresses, a significant demand for tech talent continues to grow. Against this backdrop, Instahyre – the AI-driven HRTech platform, recently unveiled in its report the most popular skills in tech roles across different experience levels, along with average salaries for four distinct experience levels from freshers to leadership-level tech talent.

The report also lists the popularity of new and legacy skills among tech candidates across all experience levels.

Data Science & Machine Learning

In today’s digitally driven era, Data Science has gained significant traction among tech talent. Considering the surging popularity of the technology, Python emerged as the most preferred programming language among tech talent fulfilling data science roles.

On the contrary, R [for Data Analytics] and Machine Learning are considered the least popular skills required to fill data science roles at the fresher [0-1 years], mid-level [2-5], and senior [6-9] experience levels respectively.

Along with Data Science, organisations are also continuing to capitalise on Big Data functions to gather more insightful market intelligence and build agile practices.

In tandem with this, demand for tech talent is witnessing remarkable growth mainly in Data Collection skills. The skill predominates the market across all experience levels, overpowering Data Extraction and Data Warehousing skills.

Since DevOps has gained huge popularity in recent years, Instahyre report unveils that freshers of 0 to 1 years of experience prefer to master AWS skills as it helps them command higher salaries.

However, for candidates at different levels exceeding 2+ years of experience, Jenkins dominates DevOps. Next, CI-CD and Virtualization are the least popular skills for 0 to 5 and 6 to 10+ years experienced talent.

Since BFSI is continuing to move on a digital transformation spree, the significant demand for IT security professionals is also mushrooming at an unprecedented pace.

As there is an exponential rise in sophisticated cyber-attacks, freshers talent and leaders with 10+ years are more inclined towards cybersecurity skills while mid-level executives prefer to acquire a job role in security testing functions.

Apart from this, the Instahyre report suggests that Endpoint Security and Application Security have emerged as slightly lesser popular skills in the IT security segment across all four experience levels.

Sarbojit Mallick, co-founder, Instahyre, said, “Quite evidently, a common trend is apparent across functions and levels – new skills are more popular among freshers. This is due to the fact that leadership levels started their career with legacy skills. This directly affects the availability of candidates as well as the leeway for recruiters in negotiating salary and benefits packages. Organisations are also focusing on high-demand skills to remain proactively competitive.”

For BFSI Tech Talent, the report discovered good news: the gender diversity scenario is slightly less skewed in favour of males than the overall Indian tech talent pool.

The tech skills with the widest and narrowest gender gaps are CCNA and Quality Assurance, respectively.

The report added that in order to help BFSI recruiters and HR heads bridge the gender gap in tech roles, the report identified the gender gaps for each of the 66 skills that fall under the 10 job functions covered in the State of BFSI Tech Talent Report 2023.