Selvan D, senior vice president, Talent Transformation, Wipro Technologies says, "Apart from the WASE program, we also have been hiring science and mathematics graduates and training them to become software professionals. But, these professionals have been mostly trained to work for application, development, and maintenance kind of projects. Last year, we had taken around 100 science graduates for this purpose."

Infosys, however, puts these hires into areas such as testing, infrastructure management, and product engineering, etc and also software engineering. Even Wipros plans are along these lines, reserving the high technology areas for BEs. TCS, on the other hand, plans to use its newly trained graduates for the entire range of practices that the company has.

Maitra of Infosys says, "While we have a robust training mechanism in place to groom such hires, the expectation is that they will demonstrate proficiency in competencies like analytical thinking, process, and quality orientation, team work, business communication, testing, design, etc."

BEs Vs BScs?
Does this mean that these graduate turned software engineers would be at par with their BE peers in the company? No. The compensation offered will be less than what BEs get. Companies are not shying away from this fact. Srinivas of TCS says, "BEs will always have an edge over their new peers as the number of years they have put in are not the same."

Talking about the challenges TCS faced in identifying the 500 trainees, Srinivas says, "Talent is not the exclusive preserve of any group and the challenge for us was spotting the right talent. Also, it was a challenge in terms of getting the right talent from the diversified group across the country, over a period of seven months and transforming them into world-class software professionals."

Expanding the Talent Pool
Realizing the need for availability of quality talent, prime minister Manmohan Singh, during his 60th Independence Day address promised to set up five Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, eight IITs, seven IIMs, and 20 IIITs (Indian Institute of Information Technology). He also declared secondary and higher education as a priority and vowed to support 6,000 new high quality schools besides 370 colleges in districts with low enrollment rates.

The Potential
Considering that India churns out 3.1 mn graduates annually, the TCS program is an appreciable effort. Everybody has been talking about expanding the talent pool by moving into tier-2 and tier-3 locations, but this is probably the first time that such an initiative has been undertaken in a dedicated manner. If successful, this will change the rules of the game and all the discussion around talent shortage will subside. Will this stop the flight of a potential software workforce who are gravitating toward BPO for want of a BE qualification. Becoming a software professional will become more attractive. Will it impacts the BPO hiring. Another issue that needs to be tackled is the degree of employability, which is pretty low. Finishing school initiatives that have been undertaken by some of the state governments need to be accelerated to improve the situation on this front. It is hoped that other companies will also follow suit, once the TCS pilot succeeds.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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