PARADIGM SHIFT: Jaya Jha and Abhaya Agrawal (below) are among those who have changed their professions. Pics: Bangalore News Photos

Sayan Chatterjee is not complaining. The global meltdown has taken its share of victims, but the 24-year-old former research analyst says he’s happy. After all, had it not been for the crisis, Chatterjee would never have found his true calling.

Chatterjee had his brush with the slowdown just months after he joined the Chennai-based back office of an American bioinformatics firm in July 2008. “When (American investment banker) Lehman Brothers fell in September, we could feel the reverberations at our Chennai lab. There was a cost cutting spree and projects began drying up,” says Chatterjee.

Although his own job was not at stake, he sensed a salary freeze and imminent job cuts. So Chatterjee — who had acquired a masters in technology from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani — decided to rewrite his career goals. He applied for a teaching job.“Since I had plans to go for a PhD, I looked for a lecturer’s job. I got two offers and chose the better one at the biotechnology division of Techno India College at Salt Lake in Calcutta,” he says.

The economic situation may now be looking up, but scores of people who made a career switch because of the meltdown are happy with the way things have turned out.

Clearly, the impact of the global meltdown on the information technology (IT) industry forced a lot of young techies to rethink their career plans. Many looked at jobs and opportunities outside the IT industry. Two of Chatterjee’s former colleagues have gone in for a PhD programme. Another has moved to the publication division of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research in Delhi.

“The increasing number of CVs from techies at our office indicates that IT companies were downsizing in hordes. Some of the job aspirants, upset with the air of insecurity, are ready to switch careers,” says Tushar Basu, director, Analytics Consultant, an HR consultancy firm.

Take the case of 25-year-old Joydeep Chakraborty, a civil engineer who joined a multinational IT company after graduating from the Bengal Engineering College, Howrah, in 2007. “Things were fine till October 2008. But then came the buzz of job cuts. Every morning we’d open the office mail with apprehension,” he says. So Chakraborty decided to return to his core field. Early this year he joined a large Calcutta-based construction firm.

“The IT sector’s loss is our gain,” exclaims S.P. Gon Chowdhury, director of the West Bengal Renewable Energy Development Agency. “IT graduates, who earlier ignored green technology, are lapping up green jobs,” he says. A fresh IT graduate from a top college who does not wish to be identified is among those who have moved out of IT. “Even though I got a campus job offer from a big IT company last year, they kept postponing the joining date.”

The situation forced the graduate to think of another area — and he zeroed in on the fast growing field of alternative energy. He refused the appointment letter and joined Bhaskar Silicon, a Rs 2,000-crore solar power firm at Haldia. “The alternative energy sector is the future of technology, not IT,” he says.

While some are returning to core sectors, others like Subrata Banerjee are tapping their inner talents. Banerjee used to be an instructional designer at Helix Technology Solutions, a Hyderabad-based e-learning company. “My bosses made some wrong moves in the wake of the economic debacle. Although there was no immediate threat to me, I’d decided to realign my career plan because I felt I’d been stuck in the profession for 12 years,” he says. Since Banerjee had a talent for interacting with clients, he joined the corporate communication division of Logica, a Bangalore-based IT company.

For many like Banerjee who had a feeling that they are stuck in insipid jobs, the recession has been an opportunity to do something different, says Malavika Desai, a career transition coach and CEO, RCG Management, an HR consulting firm. “The recession can be considered an opportunity because it may force you out of your comfort zone and make you revisit your goals,” she says.

After the meltdown, Desai received scores of CVs from techies. “In our country a job loss is still considered quite shameful. They couldn’t even share their feelings with friends or family.”

If Desai were ever to meet Bangalore-based IT professionals Jaya Jha and Abhaya Agrawal, she might just cite them as an inspiration, for they deliberately chose the crisis period to launch their self-publishing startup, pothi.com. “We’d decided to launch it in July 2008 because that was when server costs were low, office space cheaper and talent easier to find,” says Agrawal who had been pursuing his MTech at Carnegie Mellon University, US. “We knew we’d get a headstart because our competitions wouldn’t launch me-too versions, for they’d be reeling under the recession.”

These classmates from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, hit upon the idea of the startup years ago when Jha failed to bring out her poetry collection. “I realised that publishing was inaccessible to most and if we can create a print-on-demand technology we’ll be able to cater to a large number of discerning authors,” says Jha who sacrificed a plum job at Google India to take the plunge.

They were quite surprised that they were able to bring out 140 titles in just nine months and recover the initial investment. Now they are planning to expand the business.

Though many of those who have moved out of the IT sector have had to go in for income cuts, few have any regrets. “I’ll never accept a full-time job in a big IT company even when the downturn is over,” says Agrawal. “Small companies have a huge advantage over the bigger ones. They’re more flexible and can take risks. I believe that small is the new large.”

Bhaswar Moitra, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University, believes that economic crises often spur innovative people to break the “fetters of big companies” and start building new business models.

Clambering off the IT bandwagon is a growing trend among fresh graduates, believes B.B. Poira, principal of Calcutta’s Heritage Institute of Technology. “Until last year well paid jobs in IT companies were the only goals for most students. Now they’ll think of innovating and focusing on other sectors.”

“The recession has indeed been a blessing in disguise because it has shattered complacency and we are being forced to be innovative and nimble,” stresses Kalyan Kar, managing director of Acclaris India, an IT service provider. However, he doesn’t believe that switching careers is the only option. “It’s time to focus on higher education and reassessment for IT employees. In the long run those who learn from mistakes will flourish.”

Desai has the last word. “The key to survival in the crisis is to realign yourself with reality,” she says.