India’s second-largest software exporter on Monday outlined its vision for the company and several senior executives spoke about the changes in strategy in terms of hiring and retraining its employees.
Building skills of the future workforce onsite and offshore, including hiring from the Indian Institutes of Technology and design professionals, was one of the most prominent themes at the Infosys analyst meet on Monday, as the company spoke about its vision for the future.
India’s second-largest software exporter on Monday outlined its vision for the company and several senior executives spoke about the changes in strategy in terms of hiring and retraining its employees.
“We have seen an exponential increase in (the) embrace of new technology, and this is creating a wide talent-skill gap,” said Infosys COO UB Pravin Rao, adding the company sees this as a big opportunity to re-skill its workforce.
He added the company was trying to attract talent from IITs and other large technology institutes for a stream called “power programmers”.
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The deputy COO Ravi Kumar said for the first time, Infosys is also looking at hiring liberal arts graduates as well, who will “inspire design”.
The company is also “repurposing and refactoring talent, and localising talent, to get closer to client clusters” in a big way, said Kumar.
Elaborating on the onsite strategy, which Infosys has said will include hiring 10,000 locals in the United States by next year, Kumar said there will be four hubs operational in the US by fiscal year 2019.
The company said during its fourth quarter earnings announcement on April 13 that it had hired 800 plus campus hires in the US. Kumar said Infosys will replicate it in Europe and other markets as well, and would also hiring laterally.
Unlike the longer training period for Indian campus graduates, which lasts for about four months, the US campus recruits have a smaller training cycle. “We do an 8-12 week intervention to get campus hires into production in the US,” said Kumar.
The local centres coming up will each focus on different aspect such as design and open source.
The company is also focusing on building an onsite, or client side, matrix of employees, instead of just off site or in India.
COO Rao said Infosys has extended its learning capability to clients as well. “For example, we trained 500 employees of one of our financial services clients,” he said.