TCS to recruit 1,500 UK tech professionals this year

Indian IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will hire 1,500 IT professionals in the UK this year as part of its investment plans.

The company, which has a UK workforce of more than 20,000, said the jobs will be well paid, including project delivery roles, and will be distributed across the country.

The announcement followed a meeting in India between TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan and UK trade secretary Liz Truss.

TCS is long established in the UK and Gopinathan said the announcement builds on more than four decades of investment in the UK by TCS. “Our sustained investments have made TCS the preferred growth and transformation partner of our valued customers in the UK, allowing them to digitally transform their business for competitive growth,” he said.

Following the meeting, Truss said the UK government and TCS “will be collaborating much more closely in the industries of tomorrow, like science, tech and green growth”.

TCS is one of the UK’s largest recruiters of IT professionals with a workforce comprising 54 nationalities.

In the UK, TCS also has a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills programme, in which more than 150,000 young people in the UK have taken part in the last three years. It offers a bursary to provide financial assistance to students from low-income backgrounds.

Globally, TCS has more than 400,000 staff and is one of the world’s biggest IT services companies. It is referred to as India’s biggest IT services firm, but last year, for a short time, it also boasted the highest market value of any global IT services company for the first time. Then, TCS was valued at almost $145bn, while Accenture, the previous biggest, was valued at $143.4bn. 

Growth in IT jobs is welcome news amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the disruption it has caused. Almost one-third of companies in the UK and Ireland furloughed IT staff in 2020 during the coronavirus outbreak, according to research by Computer Weekly.

TCS’s UK head, Amit Kapur, said the company is creating thousands of well-paid jobs in communities across the country.

According to Computer Weekly’s research, on average, IT workers in the UK in 2020 made £71,880 a year, a drop from 2019’s average of £79,354. This varies based on job title, industry and number of years in the sector.

Senior IT leaders made £97,105 a year on average, although those working in companies with more than 1,000 employees averaged £13,895 more a year, bringing in £111,000.

The same trend was seen for IT managers, who earned an average of £62,959 – a slight increase on 2019’s £61,232 – but averaged £79,000 in larger companies.