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Archana Venkat

Chennai , Dec. 28

It is fairly common for BPO/ITES employees to quit their jobs in favour of an IT job. While most BPO/ITES companies accept the situation, the Cybernet Software Systems (CSS) Group has devised a `career growth' plan to use the trend to retain employees within the group.

Under the plan, employees of SlashSupport, the Group's tech support company, can move to ReadyTestGo (RTG), its software testing company. Employees with engineering or computer science background and 18 months of work experience with SlashSupport are eligible to join RTG. Selected candidates undergo a month-long certificate course in software testing, before joining RTG.

According to Mr Sridhar Kulasekharan, Head - Enterprise Services, CSS Group, this plan was developed keeping in mind the aspirations of CSS Group's ITES employees.

Typically employees quit between the fourteenth and eighteenth month of their tenure seeking an IT job. "Besides IT jobs, employees will also have more opportunities to grow within the company," he said.

Employees aspire to become project leaders in IT companies and this could take six to twelve years, says Mr Kulasekharan. But at RTG they can become project leaders earlier because their chances are better. At RTG "one out of sixty people becomes a project leader, as opposed to one out of 250 people in other IT companies", he said.

So far about 20 employees have moved from SlashSupport to RTG and 30 more are undergoing eligibility tests. RTG has 350 employees and plans to become a 750-strong company by November 2007. Of the 400 people that would be added, 100 would be from SlashSupport, he said.

Besides adding to the headcount, the `career growth' plan reduces the time and investment on training fresh hires. "Hiring in-house talent will reduce costs by up to 30 per cent. But this saving would be spent on the software testing course for SlashSupport employees," said Mr Kulasekharan. The company has created a separate 250-seat facility for this purpose.

The Group is exploring the possibility of including its other companies - ManageInfra (remote infrastructure services provider) and Synaptris (a product company providing enterprise reporting and printing solutions) - under the `career growth' plan.

More Stories on : Human Resources | Outsourcing | Software

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