A New Start: FT: Infosys - Programmers’ passage to India

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Running a training centre on this scale poses considerable management challenges. Infosys takes graduates from across the world – with varying strengths, abilities and cultural expectations – and must bring them to a similar level of understanding on complex subjects, while instilling them with a sense of the Infosys culture.

The US graduates divided into two streams on arrival at Mysore: the computer science majors who take a two-and-a-half month software engineering course before moving to on-the-job training, and those from other backgrounds, including the liberal arts, who study for three-and-a-half months.

Mr Pradhan says the company can turn most smart graduates into software engineers regardless of their academic background because it hires people with so-called “learnability” – Infosys jargon for strong logic skills.

He says the Americans exhibit different learning patterns from their Indian and other Asian counterparts. They prefer to keep lectures short and break them up with exercises. By contrast, Indian students can sit through three hours of lectures while some Chinese interns, he says, can last nine hours.

Mr Pradhan says the company is not concerned with how the trainees learn, so long as it works. “What we want is a 126-person strong set of software programmers, not students,” he says. So far, no US trainee has dropped out.

Programmers’ passage to India

By Joe Leahy

Published: November 27 2006 17:35 | Last updated: November 27 2006 17:35

On a gloriously sunny morning Anubhav Pradhan, an instructor at Infosys’s software engineering factory in Mysore, southern India, is telling his class about “entity beans” and “persistence mechanisms”.

To the outsider the software engineering jargon at the Global Education Centre, is exotic, even impenetrable. But even more unusual are his students. Instead of the normal class of diligent trainees from India or elsewhere in Asia, Mr Pradhan is teaching a group of American graduates.

The class is part of an ambitious experiment by Infosys, India’s second largest computer services company. In a reversal of the usual pattern of outsourcing, in which developed world jobs are replaced by cheaper Indian ones, Infosys will next year start a pilot programme in which it will recruit 25 graduates from 12 UK universities for training in Mysore before eventual redeployment in their home markets.

The programme will expand on a scheme the company kicked off in July, when it started training 126 US graduates at Mysore. It plans to have trained a total of 300 US graduates when this fiscal year ends in 2007.

Known as the Global Talent Programme, the scheme is part of an increasing push by Indian outsourcing companies to make the relationship with their clients in their target markets more “seamless”. Technology may have “flattened the world” – a phrase made famous by Thomas Friedman’s book about outsourcing and which has become a mantra at Infosys. But there is still nothing like having a local face to talk to when you are overhauling something as critical as your IT systems and business processes.

For Infosys, the scheme is also part of a more ambitious move up the value chain into the territory of its more established, developed-world rivals. Rather than just helping clients re-engineer their IT systems or writing new software for them, the company wants to advise them on how to deal with large shifts in technology and other strategic issues.

Or, as chief executive Nandan Nilekani, puts it: how to “navigate the twists and turns” and “win in the turns”. In the quarter ended September 30, this type of business accounted for about 21 per cent of Infosys’s $746m in sales.

“In a sense, our whole endeavour is to go from just being perceived as an outsourcing company to somebody who can be a trusted transformation partner for our clients,” Mr Nilekani says. “There is no company that can do both very well.”

In an industry as reliant on engineering talent as computer services, the training centre at Mysore is a vital part of this strategy. The facility currently has capacity for 4,500 trainees at a time but this will be increased to 13,500 in about 12 months. Investment in the 335-acre complex, which also includes offices and software development blocks, will total $300m.

A significant portion of the new students will, for the first time, be non-Asian. In the UK, the company plans to tap several universities such as Cambridge, University College London and University of Nottingham. In the US it drew candidates from 82 universities.

Out of class and late at night in one of the campus’s pristine canteens, a group of students from Hyderabad, another southern Indian city, talk as though they are in another country.

“The biryani here is not biryani,” they say, implying it is not as good as their own regional variation. They find the course very intensive and disappear after dinner to continue studying.

The Americans seem more relaxed even though they are further from home. Like most of the Americans, David Craig, who studied engineering management at the University of Arizona, says he first heard of Infosys through the careers service at his college.

He was persuaded to join by his father, a systems engineer, who had just bought the stock. “I had never been overseas before. I had just been down to Mexico and up to Canada and that was about it,” says Mr Craig.

All had to battle perceptions at home about what they would be doing in India. Nathan Linkon, a marketing executive, was part of an earlier pilot programme in 2004, when outsourcing was a political hot potato in the US. “People were saying to me, ‘I’ll call you when I have a problem with my Dell computer’.”

Perhaps the most important difference between the US trainees and their local counterparts is that ultimately the foreigners are being groomed for a return to their home markets.

The company is kind to them – allowing them, for instance, to take long weekends to see more of the country – with the aim of creating brand ambassadors who are familiar with both Indian culture and their own.

Some of Infosys’s competitors could argue that the company is in fact late to the party. Only 3 per cent of Infosys’s 66,150-strong workforce is not Indian. This compares with the industry leader, Tata Consultancy Services, 8 per cent of whose 78,000 staff are foreign. TCS also runs extensive internships lasting 12-18 months, after which the company decides whether it wants to hire the candidates.

There is also a risk that Infosys’s foreign graduate recruits will simply use their training to enhance their CVs before joining larger rivals. First-hand experience of outsourcing is becoming a valuable commodity in the IT industry.

“There is a lot of demand. India is suddenly very hot and our brand is strong, so we get the best people,” says Mohandas Pai, Infosys head of human resources.

‘Club Med’ for Mysore

Step on to an Infosys “campus” and it is hard to escape the feeling you have somehow entered the set of “Logan’s Run”, the science-fiction film starring Michael York in which no one seems to make it beyond 30 years of age.

The average age at the Bangalore headquarters of the Indian computer services company is 26; at its Mysore training campus it is even lower. Yet to attract and retain a young workforce of highly trained software engineers Infosys has worked hard to provide a workplace culture that appeals to them.

Its efforts cover language as well as the physical landscape. Trainees are “infoscions”; Narayana Murthy, one of the founders, is the “chief mentor”; and recruits are hired for their “learnability”.

There are no bars on the spotless Mysore campus. Instead, there is an Employee Care Centre, whose halls of table tennis and billiard tables, rooftop swimming pool, yoga room, music room, and bowling alley, would put an elite club to shame. At the rear is the field where the Indian women’s cricket team trains. Nearby is the spiky sphere of a multiplex cinema that looks like one of the attractions at the Florida Walt Disney World.

The company went to great lengths to accommodate the US graduates. The group’s head chef designed a menu for them while instructors attended cultural sensitivity sessions and neutralised their accents.

But the US trainees proved adaptable anyway. It is now mainly the Chinese trainees who eat the western food – their US peers often prefer Indian dishes. If anything, some of the US graduates would like more contact with the real India outside the compound’s walls.

“They do a good job of hiding that it is a developing country when you’re on campus. I feel like I’m at Club Med,” says Katrina Anderson, a mathematics major from the University of Notre Dame.

Comments

It's no surprise that the US trainees haven't dropped out. I think US students are underestimated. Anyway, great program. How do one apply to such a graduate trainee program. What do you look for in possible candidates?

Posted by: Dene-Looking for a graduate trainee opportunity | November 03, 2008 at 10:06 AM