IT Companies Enter a ‘Skills’ Race

IT firms are investing in their workforce in order to keep pace with the increasing demand for digital services and new software technologies.

In India, fresh graduates hired by companies are trained for a certain amount of time, usually in months. However, the emergence of new digital technologies is forcing these companies to take a new stand, by retraining the entire organization at a skills based level.

Training is also taking up an ever larger part of an IT company's time, money and resources. In 2015, Accenture invested more than $800 million in training and development by using virtual classrooms to deliver training to employees on request. Accenture has recruited just over 350,000 employees till now, almost one-third from India.

The Cost of training employees has been on the rise. According to Nasscom, the trend in training is beginning to change in the IT industry, with senior level training requiring more capital, as compared to fresher training in the past. "The current number [regarding training costs] would definitely be higher. The 1-2% was the percentage of fresher training cost. Now, companies are doing mid-career training, design thinking, product management and some of those newer things which would be through the employee life cycle and not entry level where the bulk of training costs were earlier concentrated," said Sangeeta Gupta, VP, Nasscom.

"We need to provide anytime, anywhere learning because at our scale, it is not possible to train everyone in a classroom. So we have online learning management platforms - iClass, an online instructor led learning program. All of these take investment. It is like running an internal online university," Ajoyendra Mukherjee, executive vice president and head of global human resources at TCS.

TCS has around 3,35,000 employees. TCS also said that on average its employees spent 10.3 days on training during a year. Similarly, at Infosys, employees spent roughly 37 days in training, with middle management spending 2.94 days, senior management spending 1.64 days, and top management spending 1.83 days.

Recently, Wipro said it has launched a program to train 10,000 employees in various new types of technologies. "We have launched a programme to train around 10,000 employees in digital technologies during the year. As Wipro Digital gains traction, it will drive greater impact through re-shaping the form and scale of our customer engagement," Wipro CEO TK Kurien stated.

The trend in training is quickly catching up to companies in India as well.