Indian outsourcing trainees feel heat of recession
Pressure mounts at giant Infosys campus
Saritha Rai visits Infosys’s giant Mysore training centre to gauge how outsourcers are using education to maintain their edge in challenging economic times.
Just before nine o’clock every morning, thousands of twenty-somethings stream across an expansive landscaped campus - past the Domino’s Pizza, the 24x7 library, the official merchandise store - and into large classrooms. A hundred or so file into one room, firing up their computers as their lecturer clips on his microphone and gets started on a two-hour session about Java technologies.
This could be a university classroom anywhere in the world but it isn’t. It is the sprawling training centre of India’s second-largest outsourcing company, Infosys Technologies, which boasts $4.6bn in revenues and 104,000 employees, at last count.
The 336-acre expanse, with its capacity to train 14,000 people, is likely to be the largest dedicated corporate training centre in the world. Even global outsourcing rivals would find it hard to replicate this scale in other offshore centres like Ireland, Russia or Vietnam.
But despite its grandeur, the campus has not been able to insulate itself from the effects of the global recession.
Given Infosys’s extensive hiring - peaking to 10,000 or more new hires during some quarters - it has no option but to take on fresh university graduates. And the chosen ones are not handed an appointment letter and herded to their work desks. Instead, they are bussed off to the training campus in Mysore, a three-hour drive from Infosys’ headquarters in Bangalore.
Infosys executives say intensive employee training gives the company an edge over its rivals. "It helps us meet and exceed customer expectations while maintaining our competitive edge," says Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys. "When a global customer is experiencing different suppliers, our employees come out differently," adds Girish Vaidya, senior vice president and head of the Infosys Leadership Institute.
