At Infosys, reskilling is growth mantra

For Krish Shankar, executive vice-president & group head of human resource (HR) development at Infosys, the defining moment of the pandemic on the HR department has been the importance that reskilling and learning have managed to get.

For Infosys, the focus on reskilling started three to four years back as business saw a shift towards digital, and the pandemic has really brought the importance of reskilling to the fore. “In the past, certification courses or taking up an elearning course was just a way towards promotion, and was not taken too seriously. That has been changing in the last 2-3 years, and the pandemic has accelerated this trend. Today, 80 per cent of our people in our new digital businesses are in-house talent,” said Shankar.

Shankar also says that the shift in business revenue has made employees realise the importance of reskilling. In 2018, digital businesses contribution to the revenue was 2527 per cent, at present it is 50 per cent and that business is growing 40 per cent. “People can see where the growth is coming from. They have to reskill to really be a part of this growth. One way to make them part of this is incentives, the second is about creating technology and platforms,” he added.

To begin with, Infosys identified 36 skills that were important and created learning pathways.

In addition to these courses, employees also had to get certification. “Once they got the certification, they would be redeployed and needed to work in that position for a period of six months to get a skill tag. This allows them to be called a cloud architect or digital engineer, and once that is done, they get a skill bonus once a quarter,” said Shankar.

Along with this, the company also added another parameter for employees to be evaluated upon, which is called the Digital Quotient (DQ). DQ is more about getting points and how employees keep on improving this so that they get a faster roadmap to their career growth.

Infosys’ focus on reskilling and training started three years back, when it began a journey on being a Live Enterprise, or an agile company. It created the LEX platform that allows its employees to accelerate their talent transformation journey. Almost 90 per cent of employees at Infosys are learning though LEX, with an average daily user of 25,000. “We have been on this journey for a few years but the pandemic has accelerated this manifold,” added Shankar.

This is also evident in the way the company has been hiring freshers. Unlike in the past, where the bulk of the engineers would be hired in the ~3.5-3.7 lakh range, now the focus is different. “Today, we have got a large number of people who join as power programmers and get double the entry-level salary or those who join as digital engineers and again get a higher salary. Those who still get in the normal range can always use the bridge programmes made available to them to enhance their skills and get into better roles,” said Shankar.