Healthcare and pharma industry will see a hike of about 11.5 per cent: TeamLease report

Ranking fourth in salary hikes among sectors, pharma sector has seen an increase of 1.5 per cent over last year

There is an increasing demand for talent across sectors with employees expected to received double digit salary growth, if the latest report by Teamlease is to be believed. Teamlease Annual Salary Primer, released recently, analysed a variety of attributes that govern the dynamics of the employment market – skills, salaries, increments and longevity (which is a measure of the time period for which a profile would stay in a job – the inverse of attrition).

The report, which covers 15 key industry verticals, also goes on to say that candidates undergoing appraisal this year will witness a double digit salary growth ranging between 10.5 per cent to 15 per cent across industries and functions, setting in a upbeat tone for the year. “The healthcare and pharma industry will see a hike of about 11.5 per cent in 2015-16 up from 10 per cent in 2014-15. This can be attributed to a substantial degree of expansion of healthcare businesses across the country and, especially, in the tier-I and tier-II cities,” says Rituparna Chakraborty, Senior Vice President & Co-founder TeamLease Services. The sector stands fourth in rankings this year, and is behind IT, retail and telecommunications. Salaries in retail and telecom industries are expected to grow at about 12.2 per cent. Chakraborty stated that the relatively modest growth in salaries in healthcare and pharma is due to the fact that the industry is almost perpetually a positive growth machine, hence, annual rates of growth are bound to be moderated.

The hike will be different across different levels. While graduate starting salaries still lag behind, starting at Rs 350,000 (5.8 per cent hike) across sectors, those with Masters will draw Rs 470,000 (7.4 per cent hike) across sectors. Senior management salaries are expected to beat the average across job levels, at 11.9 per cent, while middle management professionals can expect an increase of about 11.1 per cent. There are citywise salary trends as well for different sectors. “While Mumbai still leads in terms of pharma jobs, Bengaluru has been offering higher salaries as well as steeper salary hikes. Proliferation of healthcare facilities in the city has led to an increased demand for healthcare professionals and support staff,” Chakraborty chips in.

Detailed analysis throws light on the salary trends across blue collar profiles. Median salaries for some of these profiles are around 30 to 50 per cent higher than the minimum wages. The study also highlights that apart from the hard skills, soft traits such as honesty, personal hygiene and mannerisms are increasingly gaining demand. “Healthcare companies emphasise on both soft and technical skills, while pharma companies stress relatively more on the latter. Soft skills sought are listening and counselling, relationship/ rapport building, transactional and interpersonal skills. Hard/ technical skills sought are problem solving, critical thinking, technology acquaintance, and goal orientation,” she explains.

Specific job profiles are also more in demand as compared to others and it seems as if R&D in pharma is going full steam ahead. Pharma scientists, radiologists and clinical research associates are being highly sought after because of the increasing specialisation that the industry is transforming itself into, stresses Chakraborty.  Technologically innovative profiles such as pharma technology and life sciences, SMAC: social networking, mobile computing, business analytics and cloud computing, Hadoop etc will see more demand in the future. Approximately, 55 pharma companies were considered in the analysis with 20 being MNCs, rest, domestic. The former offer about 20 per cent better salary hikes compared to the latter.

The unified salary report covers 15 key industry verticals namely agriculture & agrochemicals, automobile & allied industries, consumer durables, power & energy, FMCG, manufacturing & allied industries, BFSI, telecommunication, hospitality, healthcare & allied industries, BPO & information technology, ITeS, retail, construction & real estate as well as media & entertainment.  The functional domains analysed are accounts, administration blue collar, support services, engineering, human resources, IT and sales & marketing while the locations covered are Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune and Delhi.

Key findings of the survey

• Talent demand peaks, and salaries rise substantially: Salaries have risen significantly for about 37 per cent of all profiles surveyed, incrementally for 44 per cent. Double digit salary growth – ranging from 10.5 per cent to 15 per cent – is more the norm than exception with about half the industries.
• Salary variance between temp and perm jobs narrows sharply across a slew of job profiles and across industries. The most equitable unified salaries have a sliver-thin variance of between 2.2 per cent and 2.5 per cent – down from last year’s low of between 4.7 per cent and 5.5 per cent.
• Mumbai does not just steal a march over Bengaluru and Delhi, it is also the top salary paying city across as many as seven industries. Delhi leads across four industries and Bangalore in one. In all, each of the three cities feature in about 10 of the 15 cities covered by the analysis.
• City-industry clusters are proving to wield enormous clout:  Bengaluru-IT (14.7 per cent), Mumbai-FMCG (13.6  per cent), Bengaluru-Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals (13 per cent) and Pune-Power & Energy (12.5 per cent) are the city-industry clusters that dominate this scene. The clusters are characterised by a mature talent demand-supply scenario where businesses are comfortably ensconced in cities with high quality talent pools.