We Have To Transform Talent And Encourage Life-Long Learning

Ajoy Mukherjee, EVP and Head, Global HR, TCS shares his insights on the digital disruption and how TCS is aligning its competecies in an interview to Dataquest. Excerpts:

Embrace Change

We are in an industry that has to ride “change” on a continuous basis due to changes in technology as well as new customer requirements arising from the business model and regulatory changes. The Digital technologies are now being adopted in mainstream business applications and these are resulting in the transformation of Core Systems. We have developed our Business 4.0 framework to help our customers leverage these technologies including Analytics, IOT, Automation and Cloud to grow and transform their businesses.

On the challenges

One of the primary challenges is moving to the next phase—changing how we think, learn and work. We have to transform talent and encourage life-long learning. The other aspect is increased early stage technology participation. You cannot adapt but have to anticipate change to always stay ahead of the curve.

The pace of the change and transformation is rapid and to keep up with this pace, it is critical that curricula get students “industry ready”. In addition to knowledge of core discipline, the curricula should encourage and develop the problem solving ability, innovative thinking, strong communication skills and teamwork in a collaborative manner. This can be achieved by having strong industry relationship and giving the opportunity to students to do internships so that they learn how the latest technology is applied in solving real business problems.

On skill building

TCS focuses on Education & Skill Building as a part of its Social Responsibility and has a number of programs addressing multiple stakeholders – students right from schools to the college level, faculty and Institutes. TCS works with academia and helps the institutes develop talent required for the IT industry through its Academic Interface Programs. TCS’ CampusCommune portal has helped scale the academic interface programs and today has more than 1.3 Million engineering students as active members in addition to Faculty members from different institutes and experts from TCS to exchange ideas, foster communities of interests and participate in contests thus helping develop the right talent for the industry.  

TCS has gamified hiring for niche skills through contests like CodeVita a coding competition attracting over 100,000 participants globally, EngiNX a contest for IoT design and engineering solution, InfraMind a contest in the Cloud computing and automation area to name a few.

TCS has focused on internal talent development at scale, making large investments in a digital learning platform that empowers employees to acquire new skills and stay relevant at a time of immense technology change. At an overall level, the focus on training resulted in over 5.6 million learning days in FY 18, over 247,000 employees getting trained on digital technologies, and 208,000 employees trained on Agile methodologies.

We will continue our focus on internal talent development so that our people have the opportunity to learn and work on different projects using latest technologies and apply their contextual knowledge to solve complex business problems of our customers. This will help the organization to have highly engaged employees with industry-leading retention.

TCS has always believed in the continued support of the academia, which has helped it scale new heights and uphold its position as one of the most desired employers in the industry.