Wipro is changing everything. Know how

In a bid to address evolving customer needs in a rapidly changing technology landscape, India’s third largest software exporter, Wipro, overhauled its internal training framework and launched technical programmes over the past one year.

The company is re-skilling its staff in newer areas of technology, especially digital, with a focus on commoditised service lines.

Wipro CEO TK Kurien, who undertook the revamping of the framework, also wants to create a leaner and multi-skilled taskforce.
For this, Wipro also launched at least three technical training programmes over the past year.

The three new programmes - ACME (All-round Capability Model of Excellence), UpScale and Cutting Edge - are part of a drive to skill in multiple areas, in contrast to the past in which impetus was mostly on learning one skill well.

Wipro's head of talent transformation Vishwas Santurkar told Economic Times that ACME had five dimensions of skills. “Technology is one obviously. Second is domain. The third dimension is functional areas. The quality processes, especially with Agile methodology coming in, the Agile methodologies and those areas is a fourth dimension which we feel is very important for an employee to learn. And the fifth is behavioural skills," Santurkar, a vice president at Wipro, told the financial daily.

Wipro's efforts comes at a time when its rivals like Infosys are also revamping training framework to re-skill its employees on a large scale so that top talent is identified and separated from the rest to work on the toughest and most challenging new-age customer projects.

During a meeting with analysts in March, Kurien had informed that the company was putting a new incentive scheme in place, under which incentives would be linked to incremental revenue and would also make it compulsory for account managers to cross-sell at least three of the company's five service offerings for them to earn variable pay.

Meanwhile, another programme-The Upscale- was launched to lay emphasis on learning new skills, in addition to an employee's existing area of specialisation.

"UpScale looks at what are the surround skills in your core skill area which an employee can take up. And the whole idea was that you have one core skill in which you have deep knowledge. On top of that, you take up another two skills," Santurkar told ET.

The third programme, Cutting Edge, is a new digital strategy under which company's top technical talent and highly skilled programmers are identified and will be rewarded and incentivised differently from the rest of the organisation.

"Cutting Edge is meant for seasoned developers. It is by invitation. People can't just get into the programme. People have to nominate themselves. And then we evaluate what the person has done and whether they have the ability to get into a skill like this," said Santurkar.

As India’s traditional IT Fortune 500 customers are being challenged by digital firms like Amazon and Facebook, they are undertaking large-scale technology transformations.

Customers such as retailer Target are pressurising vendors such as Infosys and Wipro, and asking for highly-skilled technical staff that is capable of solving complex, new-age technology problems.

"I think we are facing the highest levels of disruption in our history. If we don't change and adapt, we won't be around a few years from now," said Navneet Kapoor, managing director of Target India in a recent interview.

Meanwhile, Santurkar told ET that the Cutting Edge programme would be scaled up further this year as part of Wipro's digital push. Other new training initiatives that Wipro has created are Digital Architecture Academy and also a separate academy that focuses on Open Source.

"The objective of the Digital Architecture Academy, is to train the existing architects on the digital technologies and how to architect systems for the digital world. Be it cloud, or be it analytics, any of these areas," Santurkar told ET.

(Image: Reuters)