CRITICAL THINKING, STRONG PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS, GOOD COMMUNICATION AND THE ABILITY TO WORK WELL IN TEAMS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR THE STUDENTS TO BE SUCCESSFUL

Srikantan Moorthy, Executive Vice President, Infosys decodes the key elements required to have a sucessful career in the ICT industry in an exclusive interview to Dataquest. Excerpts:

What are your key priorities set for your organisation in terms of having the best of skills and your expectation from the institutions? Talent skilling is a key strategic priority for us at Infosys. Given the fast change in the technology landscape, we have created infrastructure and processes to ensure the competencies of our people are current and relevant to our business and the solutions we provide to our clients. Educational institutions must invest in creating talent that are equipped to leverage the opportunities provided by the industry. Critical thinking, strong problem solving skills, good communication and the ability to work well in teams are essential for the students to be successful. Specifically in the area of software engineering, students must have strong hands on development skills and not mere theoretical knowledge of programming.

If you look at the ICT skills landscape, what according to you are the 2 challenges the industry is facing now? Availability of adequate talent with strong foundational skills who have the ability to learn new technology is a critical challenge for the industry.

The Digital Disruption coupled with automation has completely changed the nature of tech skills required for today’s ICT jobs – as an organisation how are you coping with sourcing the right skills? Our approach to talent sourcing is based on recruiting those with good “learnability” and investing in educating them in the technology areas required for our business.

What are your top 2 priorities as an employer this year and what makes your company an employer of choice of ICT job aspirants? As an employer our focus is on recruiting the “best in class” who have the ability to learn new technologies and investing in existing employees to make their skills current and relevant for our business. Given the investment we make in educating our employees, the opportunity to learn new technologies and stay relevant to the profession makes us an employer of choice for job aspirants.