IT Major Cognizant To Lay Off 7,000 Employees By 2020, Indians To Be Most Affected

IT major Cognizant has joined the bandwagon of companies announcing layoffs and scaling down of operations.

The American tech giant has announced that it will exit its content moderation business, which will impact around 6,000 jobs.

The company additionally plans to lay off at least 7,000 mid-senior level employees over the next few quarters.

However, the company added that it plans to reskill and redeploy about 5,000 of the total impacted employees.

With the layoffs, the company said it expects to save between $500 million in 2021 and record restructuring charges worth $150-200 million by the end of next year.

The cost reduction plan also involves exiting certain content work in the digital operations practice over the course of 2020.

Cognizant, which is one of Facebook's content review contractors, is likely to exit the content moderation business after honouring the remainder of its contract.

“Exiting this area will impact an additional approximately 6,000 roles worldwide, though the company intends to work with its partners to explore ways to transition the roles to alternative vendors, thereby reducing the impact to associates,” company executives said.

Even though the company has not specified where the job cuts will be made, it is likely to have a direct impact on India as out of its 2.88 lakh global workforce, over 75 percent of them are located in the country.