BANGALORE: With an aim to gain greater proportion of their business from newer digital technologies, the Indian IT service providers are undergoing a massive training process to “Re-skill” their employees, in order to build solutions around social media, mobility, analytics and cloud deployments, reports Jochelle Mendonca of ET.

With these developments the social, mobility, analytics and cloud (SMAC) which already contributes between 5 and 10 percent of industry revenue is expected to grow 75 percent to $287 billion by 2016, as against $164 billion in 2013. Additionally, the new opportunity also requires a workforce with more skills, making companies to rethink about how they can train their employees.

Anand Deshpande, chief executive of mid-size IT company, Persistent Systems, said, "The new projects are looking at combinations of all the technologies. The software is being built by smaller teams, in short cycles, so team members have to know more about a range of technologies. So, there is a need to re-skill and retrain."

As re-skilling comes with a price tag, the training process of the employees for large companies will also be extensive and this is a tough call that has to be overlooked. Jeff Heenan-Jalil, global head of Wipro's advanced technology solutions unit, said, "Thousands of the 12,000 employees in our digital unit are in training. We now have to take the training into our stride. We are working with universities to create a master's programme to help with the skill shortage."

With this, companies such as Tech Mahindra are also looking to create a dedicated digital workforce because the company is targeting more than $500 million in revenue from this space by 2015 and is working its way hard from scratch to develop the talent.

Rishi Bhatnagar, who is global head of Tech Mahindra's Digital Enterprise Services unit said, "When we started this unit in 2012, you couldn't get a digital consultant in the market. So, we decided to build it internally. Now, we have levels from a digital developer to a digital consultant and the training is constant because the technologies change very rapidly."

"In the past, training was more structured and aligned to a few large and popular platforms. Now, training sessions are unstructured, self-driven or inhouse learning on the job and experience-driven, rather than the classical, long-classroom-based lectures. They are also no longer limited to just the technology in question," said Raja Shanmugam, co-founder, president and chief people officer at digital technology-focused company Happiest Minds.
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