The Hindu Business Line : Firms leverage cross-training to beat slowdown

New Delhi/Bangalore, Dec. 10 The ‘Jacks of all trades’, and not the ‘masters of one’ seem to be scoring in the IT industry during this crisis time. With the global financial crisis dampening IT budgets and leading to project delays, the IT industry is focusing like never before on cross-training its manpower in multiple technologies.

The tech-pack which, so far, cross-trained professionals only to rotate them in various roles and projects, now sees it as an effective tool to reduce the bench and tighten productivity levels.

More relevant now

“Cross-training is gaining even more relevance in the current context as it allows companies to enhance the ‘deployability’ of the bench. Also, given vendor consolidation scenario, even clients are asking for fewer project managers capable of handling multiple technologies,” Mr Anand Pillai, Senior Vice-President, Head – Talent Transformation and Intrapreneurship Development, HCL Technologies, says.

The industry agrees that the practice is critical in times of stress, when the productivity bar is pegged higher for employers and employees, alike. Moreover, it enables companies to avoid extreme measures, even if the demand pipeline of a particular function turns weak.

Mr S. Gopalakrishnan, CEO of Infosys Technologies, recently said his company is looking to cross-train employees – while they are on the bench.

“This will ensure that their time is utilised better, and will enable them to work on multiple technologies and multiple projects. So, if someone is trained on Java, then he could also be trained in .NET or mainframe,” he said.

Here’s a case in point. Pune-based Zensar Technologies had taken up a Government project in Asia last year, where it needed to deploy about 100 programmers with specific competencies – mainframe conversion to Java.

“We realised that it is unlikely that a similar project would come up again, and so four months before the completion of the project, we started training employees in secondary skills,” says its Deputy Chairman and Managing Director, Dr Ganesh Natarajan.

Mr Rajul Asthana, Global Head, Satyam Learning World (the company’s training unit), says that in the current economic situation, both the employers and employees need to be proactive in cross-skilling in order to survive.

The average utilisation (including trainees) for leading IT firms stood at between 69-76 per cent in the just-concluded quarter. Ms Yeshasvini Ramaswamy, Managing Director, e2e People Practices, points out that re-skilling is gaining ground as it not only makes the hiring process quicker, but also protects existing jobs.

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