Cognizant Layoffs 2026 | 12000 to 15000 employees may get impacted in project leap restructuring!

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Another day and another layoff news and I am not breaking this to you. I hope you have heard of this already. Now this time it is Cognizant. Cognizant has announced project leap which is nothing but a restructuring program. And if you believe the reports in the media 12,000 to 15,000 employees might get impacted.

[00:00:20]Now are these employees getting impacted now? No. They might get impacted in the next year because Cognizant has said that they are going to spend some $200 million plus money towards severance pay and personnel cost which clearly means that layoffs are going to happen.

[00:00:39]They're going to let go employees. If you have heard their quarterly update, you will also know that they are going towards a broader and shorter AI enabled delivery pyramid which clearly means that people in the middle layer might get impacted the most. That does not mean that other people are safe, right?

[00:00:58]But this is happening all over. So the clear questions that you need to ask yourself are two. Am I doing a managerial job where I don't have any technical involvement or any functional involvement? I'm just a people manager or a process manager. If the answer is yes, chances are that you might get impacted. Or if you are in a role where you are hands-on but you are doing a role which is highly automatable. You are doing the same thing again repeatable manual steps then again you are doing a role which might get impacted sooner or later. So these are broadly the two categories which are getting impacted in most companies. So now how do you identify if your role is safe? How do you identify if something of this sort is going to happen in your company, then you will not get impacted.

[00:01:45]So if you're in a service company, it is pretty simple. Ask yourself one question. Am I in a billable role? What does that mean? Billable role means that the client is paying money to your employer for your involvement or your effort. Right? So if you are in a billable role, chances are that you may not get impacted. But the next question is, is my project stable? Which means, is the client going to pay continuously for this project? If the answer is yes, and if you're in a billable role, if you're in a client-f facing role, good news. Chances are that your role is relatively safe. That is the first thing you need to check. Second thing you need to check is, is my manager giving any feedback to me directly or indirectly?

[00:02:31]By directly, I mean, have you got some bad ratings? Have you got lower band ratings in the past few appraisals? If that is the case, it's a red flag. Or if informally your boss has told you that you know what, there are so many people on the bench, we are not getting good projects, we might release you to the pool. If those kind of indirect signals are coming, then also it is a red flag.

[00:02:54]And third thing if you have seen in your vertical or in your company that a lot of senior people are leaving okay VP and above SPB and above if a lot of senior people are leaving then that is also indication that something is not right in your company. So observe these things. Few other things that you can observe is is there a hiring freeze which means your company is not hiring from the market. they have so many people on the bench that they first want to consume all of them in billable roles and they don't want to hire from outside. So that is again a signal that the company is not in a good shape. So in my view those people who are in clientf facing role those people who are in technical hands-on role are relatively safe as compared to others.

[00:03:39]If you are just into people management, reporting, non-technical work, then there are chances that you may get impacted and we all know that mostly the managers are the people who have spent 15 years, 20 years, 25 years in the industry, right? So if you are a junior person, chances are that your job is relatively safe as compared to these people. But looking at the overall scenario, the learning for the junior people is that you should focus on saving money for the rainy day. Now you have seen that as you grow in experience, the number of opportunities will reduce and hence the money that you make in your early years, if you are able to save and invest that money wisely, then you will be in a better position once you reach 15 20 years of experience. So we also need to learn from the mistakes done by others. All right, that's it in this video. Let me know what do you think about it in comments. If you're new to the channel, please subscribe. And if you like the video, hit the like and the hype button and share it in your WhatsApp groups.

[00:04:39]I'll see you on another video soon. Take care and bye for