IT companies focus on reskilling
Information technology (IT) companies are gearing up to reskill their personnel, to help them stay relevant with automation.
Software service providers are seeing a shift in demand from infrastructure development and legacy services to Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data analytics, machine learning and cloud-based delivery models. Tata Consultancy Services, the country’s largest software exporter, has spoken about skilling 100,000 people in digital technology. Infosys has created a Design Thinking platform to both reskill people and drive innovation. “During the first three quarters of FY17, Wipro has upskilled more than 30,000 employees on digital technologies such as BigData, Advanced Analytics, Cloud, Mobility and Usability, Digital Security and DevOps. In fact, our employee perception survey showed an improvement of 12.5 per cent in terms of overall satisfaction, with a significant criteria being employees’ perception of sufficient opportunities to learn and grow in Wipro,” said Saurabh Govil, chief human resources officer.
Wipro has also enhanced its digital technology workforce through acquisitions like Designit and Appirio. Sectoral body Nasscom has created a learning centre with the Indian Institute of Management at Bengaluru to support small and mid-size entities’ training on emerging technologies.
“Clearly, reskilling is becoming increasingly important. Every company is doing it at multiple levels and our attempt is to aggregate that; companies can build on top of that. We will also reach out to tier-II and tier-III companies who might not be able to do everything on their own,” said Sangeeta Gupta, senior vicepresident at Nasscom.
Capgemini’s India chief, Srinivas Kandula, said at a Nasscom event last month that jobs of a large chunk of mid-level engineers at IT firms would be at risk due to automation. Wipro’s Govil believes IT is no longer only associated with “creating efficiencies” but is now “driving tangible business value”. The company says it has has created ‘technology academies’ on each of these skills needed < in the coming days, to extend training through virtual projects. One of these is a cloudbased platform, Open Connect, to enable employees to work on virtual projects. The company has agreements with certain universities for courses on emerging technologies like data sciences. It also conducts ‘hackathons’ for peerto-peer learning.
For business process management services companies, ‘soft’ skills and domain knowledge are as important as skills in emerging technologies.
“As clients keep moving up the value chain, people who come into the industry will need to be qualified, need to have good understanding of the domain — be it banking or travel. Today, they communicate directly with decision makers. Therefore, all of us are focusing on skilling to make sure the talent we have is relevant for long time,” said Keshav Murugesh, chief executive officer at WNS.
One concern is that as companies seek people with digital technology skills, courses offered by engineering colleges are not enough to meet the changing demand.