HCL TalentCare plans centres in Bengaluru, Delhi

HCL TalentCare, a new initiative of HCL founder Shiv Nadar that guarantees a job at the end of training, is contemplating two more centres in Bengaluru and New Delhi.

The firm opened its Hyderabad campus recently with an initial strength of 350 and is opening its Chennai campus on Sunday with 250 students.

The firm offers courses for engineering and management graduates who seek careers in IT and BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) industries. After piloting a batch internally in HCL Tech with over 1,200 job seekers for one year, the firm will focus on developing the first two centres. After screening the students through a test, the firm admits them into courses that last 6-9 months.

In IT, it is focusing on application development and support; testing services and IT infrastructure management.

“We put them through training to equip them with technical and soft skills and evaluate them at regular intervals. And, at the end of the final evaluation, we will find them a job. The job seekers would know where they are lacking and try to catch up,” HCL TalentCare Chief Business Officer Vijay Iyer told Business Line .

The firm charges ₹1.50-3.5 lakh depending on the duration and courseware. It has tied up with a few banks to provide loans with a moratorium, allowing the job seekers to start repaying the loans after they found a job.

“We are targeting to train 2,500 people in the first year and 6,000 next year. At the end of three years, we would have trained a total of 20,000 people,” Vijay Iyer said.

The country has about 6,000 engineering colleges but only 10 per cent of them are visited by the employers. “But that doesn’t mean that the remaining colleges do not have talent. We are aiming to reach out to the next 2,000 colleges,” he said.

“There are problems in the supply side and demand side and there is a gap between the two. While several students are not ready for jobs at the end of their graduation, the firms are facing challenges in finding the right talent and in taking them on board,” he said.

For the companies, HCL TalentCare offers two services – Talent as a Service and Talent on Demand. “They can ask for our resources as and when they require. They can come and pick the candidates from the pool. If need be, we offer customised classes to suit the specific needs of companies,” he said.

The Top IT firms would have developed their own models to meet the talent requirements.

“But it is very difficult for smaller firms to source the right talent. We will address that need. The BFSI sector too is short of skilled human resources,” he said.

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