When Infosys set out to remake its internal training programme, instructors visited flight schools to see how professional pilots are taught to deal with fast-changing situations. That led India’s outsourcing giant to model classes on flight simulators that teach recruits to work faster, think for themselves and anticipate corporate customers’ needs. They’re put through multiple scenarios, and no two training days are alike.

“It gets trainees excited and removes the fear of the unknown,” says Arpan Patro, who helped design the classes and motivates his students with the aviation aphorism: “Take-offs are optional, landing is mandatory.” The simulator-style drills piloted this summer reflect new thinking at Infosys as the company tries to move beyond the commoditised work of building and managing corporate computer systems. Much of those processes are now automated, and companies like Goldman Sachs Group and Philips are hiring Infosys and other tech outsourcers for discrete, short-term projects that help them stay current in a world of accelerating change. Chief information officers want projects to go live in weeks, rather than months, and expect engineers to solve problems on the fly.

Infosys, which recently ousted its chief executive after an internal power struggle and is now searching for his replacement, can’t afford to take customers for granted. While the company hasn’t lost any major contracts yet, competition is stiffening as rivals big and small snag digital services contracts.

The upheaval in its ranks and the challenges facing the industry has contributed to an underperforming share price. Infosys stock has fallen 7.4 per cent this year, lagging behind a 20 per cent rise in the benchmark S&P Sensex.

Asia's second largest IT services company needs to change and fast. “As technologies and the outsourcing market change rapidly, skill sets become very critical,” says Raja Lahiri, a Mumbai-based partner an India unit of advisory firm Grant Thornton. The training has to go from coding and programming to design, creativity and customer experience—areas where ther­­e’s more money on the table. “There's a clear lag in skills.”

The Infosys campus sits on 337 verdant acres in the palace-dotted city of Mysore, a three-hour drive from Bangalore headquarters. The facility has 160 classrooms, employs 380 instructors and can train as many as 15,000 people at a time. Just past 8 am on a recent weekday, herds of chattering 20-somethings trooped into one of many food courts and selected from dozens of subsidized breakfast choices, from rice and lentil dosa crepes to leavened bread parathas. Breakfast over, they entered all-day classes, where their choices were reduced to two: cope or leave.

This is a big change. Previously Indian outsourcers like Infosys fed thousands of notoriously callow engineering grads into unchallenging “software universities” that spit out people adept at generic coding but ill-equipped to devise their own solutions, much less champion them to customers.

“Back then, after three weeks of training you were ready to be deployed on a client project,” says training chief Satheesha Nanjappa, who spoke of his own inculcation in 1993.