As
Indian IT companies look to gain a greater proportion of their business
from newer digital technologies, they are undergoing a massive
retraining and skilling process to equip people to build solutions
around social media, mobility, analytics and cloud deployments.
The
newer technologies, which are typically grouped under the acronym SMAC,
already contribute between 5% and 10% of industry revenue, according to
IT lobby group Nasscom.
The
total SMAC opportunity was $164 billion in 2013, and is expected to
grow 75% to $287 billion in 2016. The new opportunity also requires a
workforce with more skills, making companies to rethink how they train
their employees.
"The
new projects are looking at combinations of all the technologies. The
software is being built by smaller teams, in short cycles, so team
members have to know more about a range of technologies. So, there is a
need to re-skill and retrain," Anand Deshpande, chief executive of
mid-size IT company Persistent Systems, told ET.
Re-skilling
is not without its costs. Persistent reported flat revenue in its
latest quarter, partially because of the need to re-skill employees. For
large companies, the scale of training is also extensive. "Thousands of
the 12,000 employees in our digital unit are in training. We now have
to take the training into our stride. We are working with universities
to create a master's programme to help with the skill shortage," Jeff
Heenan-Jalil, global head of Wipro's advanced technology solutions unit,
said in a recent interview.
Companies
such as Tech Mahindra are also looking to create a dedicated digital
workforce. The company, which is targeting more than $500 million in
revenue from this space by 2015, has worked from scratch to develop the
talent.
"When
we started this unit in 2012, you couldn't get a digital consultant in
the market. So, we decided to build it internally. Now, we have levels
from a digital developer to a digital consultant and the training is
constant because the technologies change very rapidly," said Rishi
Bhatnagar, who is global head of Tech Mahindra's Digital Enterprise
Services unit. The constant need for training is also changing the way
IT companies look at delivering new skills.
"In
the past, training was more structured and aligned to a few large and
popular platforms. Now, training sessions are unstructured, self-driven
or inhouse learning on the job and experience-driven, rather than the
classical, long-classroom-based lectures. They are also no longer
limited to just the technology in question," said Raja Shanmugam,
co-founder, president and chief people officer at digital
technology-focused company Happiest Minds.
According
to Shanmugam, the training also includes security considerations,
usability, performance, integration and compatibility requirements and
accessibility, which were previously taught to just elite groups of
architects as well as user-experience and integration specialists.
"A
reason for the different skilling is also because the implications of
the jobs are much higher. It's not just the technology, the developers
now have to understand the cases and talk a more business-centric
language not just to a CIO," said Praveen Bhadada, director of global
consulting at Zinnov Management Consulting. "The new skillsets have to
cut across all the layers of a company."
Source: The Times of India
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