New January jobs data from the United States Labor Department shows that women now outnumber men in the workforce (50.04%) for the first time since the Great Recession. Driven in part by the country’s lowest unemployment rate since the mid-1960s, every industry – even traditionally male-dominated ones – must now aggressively compete to attract and retain female employees.

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, the recently-anointed chairman and managing director of tech major Cognizant’s Indian arm says that quality of talent available for recruitment has actually improved in the last few years. But that isn’t enough for an industry that is turning really hungry for some new-age skills. He elaborates on these skills in this two-part interview.

In 2007, Pradeep Bhaskaran joined Cognizant to oversee HR for 10 countries around the world. Today, that number is 47. As head of HR for global growth markets, Bhaskaran is responsible for more than 60,000 associates across 52 nationalities that speak 34 languages. And those figures are only set to grow.

Cognizant on Friday announced the retirement of its Chief People Officer (CPO) James Lennox and appointment of Becky Schmitt, currently senior vice president and CPO at Sam’s Club

“We have reskilled our employees at scale through every disruptive technology shift to date, be it Mainframe, distributed computing or Internet. While those shifts were driven by single technologies followed by long periods of stability, digital is significantly different. In digital, we see the coming together of multiple technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain, additive manufacturing and 3D printing, and we are less likely to see long periods of stability,” says Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, CMD.