What Lies Ahead...

The number of people that a company plans to hire in the coming year is one of the better indicators of its optimism or pessimism about the immediate future. The correlation between hiring plans and business sentiment holds true not only at the company level, but also at the overall industry level and, finally, for the corporate sector as a whole.

In early 2010, Businessworld tied up with Naukri, the premier jobs portal in the country, to review hiring data and see which industries were most optimistic about their future and which ones were hunkering down for a bad year. 

In January 2010 when we conducted our first survey, plenty of pundits were predicting another bad year. As it turned out, the data pointed to a different conclusion. We carried a cover story titled "Jobs are Back" based on our analysis. Later surveys by other HR agencies vindicated our conclusions.

What does the latest BW-Naukri survey show? Well, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that hiring activity is higher than last year. The bad news is that only a few sectors show big growth in job creation — in the others, the growth over last year is not significant. Principal correspondent Shrutika Verma worked under the guidance of executive editor Rajeev Dubey to plan out the survey. She worked closely with the team from Naukri to come up with the trends in the current job market.

Meanwhile, assistant editor Vishal Krishna was working on a story that brought together his twin passions — automobiles and the cloud computing industry. For some time now, the best automakers around the world have been working on developing smart cars that will reduce — if not completely eliminate — accidents, fetch navigational data and perform a host of other functions. 

The rise of cloud computing has boosted their efforts to create cars that can communicate with each other, via the cloud. The first lot of such cars is hitting the market this year. But as Vishal points out, the really big advances in this field will take place over the next five or six years. Get a glimpse of what these cars promise and also the hurdles that automakers will need to surmount to make these cars practical.

(This story was issued in the magazine dated 21 may 2012)