What do you want to be: a Bank PO or an IT professional?

All of us desire a comfortable job that also keeps challenging us for professional and personal growth. This means one’s preferred job should allow one to apply one’s skills productively and with a sense of inner purpose and achievement. In the end, we all want, admittedly or secretly, a job that motivates us to work hard because of the harder partying that it guarantees in return. With such a job in hand, life becomes a pleasant, fulfilling journey.

Over the last decade or two, the Information Technology (IT) sector has risen to become the foremost choice as career field for youngsters, the dream job, as they call it. An engineering graduate from a good college cannot help dreaming for a placement in TCS, Infosys, Accenture, Wipro and the like because of their fair work culture, favourable growth prospects and attractive perks.

But once in, and after the first flush of excitement of having reached the Holy Grail has subsided, the realization often dawns that all the hungama about corporate life and work culture is hype, not reality. You write down codes for hours every day six days a week, chasing deadlines like fielders chasing the ball when the bowling is carted around. Where is the growth, where is the development, you ask yourself? It is back breaking drudgery, no more.

Sounds grim, doesn’t it? So what is the alternative? Well, there are several alternatives. As a general interaction with Bank PO aspirants at an examination centre will reveal, most of them are working or disillusioned IT professionals. So there you have it; IT and Bank PO are indeed the most sought jobs in India, speaking from the common students’ point of view. And there are enough reasons why the number of Bank PO aspirants matches, if not exceeds, the number of IT job seekers in our country. Consider the following:

Career choice: Why Bank PO, not IT?

Bank PO vs. IT: Job Security

The IT industry is vulnerable to global market forces like no other. IT companies flourished before the recession struck in 2008; then there was chaos. Pink slip, layoff and debt became bywords. Eight years down the line, the situation has improved, but who knows when the next recession will strike? Automation is the latest threat, a really big one. IT industry stewards are getting fired in droves as companies go in for automation-driven cost cutting.

By contrast, the 2008 recession exposed many private bankers as greed bags, but not a single regular employee of an Indian public sector bank lost his or her job!

Question: Who wins this round?

Answer: Bank PO

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