The tech giant's 'Recommendation Engine' leverages AI, machine learning and analytics to suggest training programmmes best suited for individual staff
India’s second largest IT services company Infosys is using technologies such as machine learning, big data and analytics as well as artificial intelligence to map the learning abilities of its employees.
With this, the infotech giant will suggest training programmes that best suit its staff.
The Bengaluru-based company has developed an in-house platform - Recommendation Engine - which does a 360 degree profiling of employees, using their historical data, including performance in various projects, educational qualifications, attitude and aptitude.
After this assessment, the engine recommends the skillsets each employee needs to possess and suggests the areas of improvement.
“The Recommendation Engine uses technology to understand what skills people have, what they have been learning and projects they have worked on. Based on that, we give the recommendations. We are using technology to find out where an individual is stuck and where to provide the intervention,” said Srikantan Moorthy, executive vice-president and head of global services - application development and maintenance - at Infosys told Business Standard.
According to the company, this is a full cycle of understanding a person’s current capabilities and creating a roadmap for his learning needs.
Other than the Recommendation Engine, which the company has been using for the last few month, Infosys has also rolled out ‘Lex’, a new-age learning app which can be accessed anytime and from anywhere, integrating various new technologies to gauge an individual's learning requirements.
“We don’t use this (Recommendation Engine) platform for freshers because they don’t have historical data. We use it for people with experience who have historical data,” added Moorthy.
With a massive shift in the global technology space and focus of clients shifting to digital and new age technologies, Indian and global technology services companies are emphasising on training and reskilling of employees.
Apart from Infosys, most other large and midsized IT services firms have either developed in-house training programmes or are taking the help of third-party platforms to impart training on new technologies to their workforce.
Moorthy said while the training duration for its campus recruits in India remains the same at six months, the company reduced the fresher training duration in the US to around 10 weeks as college graduates in that country join with hands-on knowledge in various programming languages and technologies.
“The duration of training in the US is about 10 weeks and after that, they get to work with some of the projects to get hands on knowledge.
"It’s because they come here with prior programming experience which is not the case for those who come out of colleges in India,” said Moorthy, who has now been given the mandate to look after talent acquisition in the US.
As part of Infosys localisation efforts, the IT giant has stepped up its hiring in the US, its largest market.
In 2017-18 alone, the company had hired around 800 fresh graduates in the country through campus interviews and it plans to add at least 1,000 campus graduates per year for the next two years.
While currently, Infosys is imparting training to its US staff from its various delivery centres in the country, the company is in the process of building a large global training centre in Indianapolis (US) where it recently opened an innovation hub, one of the four such centres planned in the country.
Moorthy said the company is looking at the training and reskilling programmes quite holistically, leveraging the external ecosystem, including online platforms like Udacity and joining hands with academic institutes as well as varsities.
As a part of its collaboration with Stanford University, select senior executives of the company get trained on various leadership skills.
Photograph: PTI Photo
