Infosys spends Rs. 750 crore on training fresh recruits

THE DIMENSION: An interior view of the new block of the Global Education Centre on the Infosys campus in Mysore.

Infosys Technologies spends Rs. 750 crore a year on training fresh recruits. The company added 3,192 staff in the first quarter of 2008-09.

“This comes to Rs. 2.50 lakh spent on each potential new employee during a 16-week training period. We don’t have a choice because existing engineering college curriculum does not turn out candidates with skills we need,” Infosys Director T. V. Mohandas Pai, told reporters visiting the sprawling training centre of the company in Mysore. The 335-acre campus, largest of the nine training centres of Infosys across India, can accommodate up to 13,500 people at a given time.

Apart from containing attrition at around 13.7 per cent against the industry average of 17 per cent, the training turned out young men and women with additional ‘soft skills’, including the ability to communicate clearly, learn efficient team work and decision-making, Mr. Pai said. Close to five per cent of trainees did not match the job skills required and had to return home.

Cost of training

The cost of training might seem high but in the West, it worked out to $50,000 per trainee as compared to $6,000 here, he explained. “If our universities upgraded and made the teaching methods more industry and employment-oriented, the IT sector need not spend that much for training. On our part, we can claim having contributed 50,000 trained persons so far to the workforce,” he said.

Infosys has its on-campus job skills programme, Campus Connect, covering 510 engineering colleges in several regions. So far, 2,300 faculties have been trained on industry needs like better understanding of concepts involved in work such as software engineering. The Mysore campus has two software development centres and a special economic zone (SEZ) facility, both being expanded now. The SEZ recorded Rs. 800 crore exports last year.