IT companies focus on re-skilling as shift to digital solutions gathers steam
As Indian IT providers 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 per cent and 10 per cent of industry revenue, according to IT lobby group Nasscom.
The total SMAC opportunity was $164 billion in 2013, and is expected to grow 75 per cent to $287 billion in 2016. The new opportunity also requires a workforce with more skills, requiring 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 digital developer to digital consultant and the training is constant because the technologies change very rapidly,” said Rishi Bhatnagar, 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 in-house learning on the job and experience driven, rather than the classical, long-class-room-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 use 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.”