India’s second biggest outsourcing firm, Infosys Technologies prides itself on its $4.6 billion in revenue and in its 104,000 employees.
It’s 336-acre campus in Mysore, India is a facility that can train as many as 14,000 people simultaneously and is perhaps the biggest dedicated corporate training hub anywhere in the world. Even global outsourcing centers the likes of China, the Philippines, or Russia have a tough time competing with the training center at Infosys.
Nonetheless, even Indian outsourcing companies, touted to be the best world wide, are feeling the pinch of the global recession. In the case of Infosys, the company hires extensively, sometimes up to 10,000 or more in a quarter. As this is the case, the mega-outsourcing firm admits it has little choice but to hire fresh college grads. In many cases the Indian education system has not fully completed its charter and these fresh graduates need additional training to be fully effective. They are sent to the Mysore-based training grounds for a ‘boot-camp’ in outsourcing know-how.
The company’s managers and executives claim that it is this king of grueling training that gives Infosys an edge over its global rivals. Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys was quoted as saying, “It helps us meet and exceed customer expectations while maintaining our competitive edge.”
Meanwhile, Girish Vaidya, senior vice president and chief of the Infosys Leadership Institute said in a statement, “When a global customer is experiencing different suppliers, our employees come out differently,” reports silicon.com.
One newly hired freshman to the Infosys training center described his visit to the training center campus as something similar to ‘entering the gates of heaven.’ In essence, many visitors to the campus have described as a corporate Disneyland as the buildings are much like the flashy structures of Las Vegas.
Indian offshore outsourcing firms like TCS and Infosys boast their capacity to mold employees to be ‘customer ready’ by utilizing training as a major differentiator between them and multinational firms like IBM and Accenture. Training is what makes their employees successful, reiterates Arup Roy, a researcher at Gartner India.
Despite the fact that some of the competition in the outsourcing business has slowed for these trainee engineers , the fundamentals are the same - Infosys has to constantly train its software engineering graduates to write meticulous code for clients the likes of Cisco Systems, Boeing, Wal-Mart, and General Motors. More importantly, the outsourcing giant also has to transform them into tech-saavy employees who are able to stand on their own in a globally competitive environment. Vaidya told silicon.com, “It is important that our employees come across as polished and poised because ours is an industry where each employee is just one step away from the end consumer.”
With the downturn in the global economy, outsourcing clients have become exceedingly value and cost-conscious. In order to meet these rigorous demands training now takes seven months rather than the previous 5-month period. The training includes technology, processes, quality standards, IP as well as soft skills.