IT banks on training to tackle crunch
Between the top five Indian firms TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and Satyam and MNCs like IBM India, Accenture and EDS, are expected to add more than 1 lakh employees this fiscal alone. This means that they better have their training machines switched on as well.
India’s two biggest IT players TCS and Infosys Technologies currently spend about 4% of their total revenues on training programme. Infosys has infact said that the company spent $5000 per fresher in FY07. Wipro spends 2% of its revenues on training. According to industry sources, the rising headcount in each of these companies has meant that the amount spent on training new employees has gone up.
Sources added that in some cases like Accenture India and cognizant the training budgets have doubled this year. And that’s not all, bigger companies are also outsourcing their training initiatives to training majors like NIIT. MR.Vijay Thadani, CEO, NIIT said that they were handling the entire induction training part for one of the large Bangalore-based IT firms.
A HR head said that the training programme costs including capex for infrastructure like classrooms and equipment have increased or doubled, with the headcount growing between 30-40% per year for each company. Another factor for the increase is because of the number of new development centres being set up.
Yeshasvini Ramaswamy, director, e2e Business Solutions said it was impossible to increase salaries after a point. She said that training make employees more employable and at times is an incentive for people to halt the job jumps. She added that the focus is on increasing employability and productivity, which is being done through relevant and extensive training programmes.
Generally freshers training takes up a large chunk of training budgets of big infotech companies. However upgradation training technical and management training also gained significant ground over the last couple of years.
