Capgemini embarks on digital re-skilling

Capgemini is embarking on a massive re-skilling initiative in India, wherein it will train thousands of employees on how to work on digital projects and engage with clients.

“If you look at delivery in digital, it is about design thinking, agile, rapid prototyping and everything that is fast and furious. The way we have designed our delivery so far is not fast and furious. We need to adjust to that in India as well,” Patrick Nicolet, Group Executive Board member, Group Competitiveness and India, told BusinessLine .

Capgemini employees over 90,000 people in India, which is over half of the company’s global workforce.

“In this changing environment, we need to create a pipeline of leaders in the middle level who would understand the changing business landscape and play a strategic role in enabling growth in digital technologies which is different from the traditional legacy business. This program is also strategic to our focus on redefining the way you engage and retain talent, especially millennials, who are increasing looking at playing a more meaningful role and aligning themselves to the larger vision of the organization,” Nicolet said.

The program, currently in its pilot stage, includes training on the business environment and new tools and methodologies. The exercise would also include re-skilling of nearly half of its India staff on digital technologies.

To target the engineers, Capgemini is building a training program for young engineers which will not force them to sign a bond with the company or stick to the company for a specific period of time.

our university, we are developing micro certifications. So instead of a three-year certification program, we are offering micro certifications for one year The programs so far were 3-5 years and now we’ve cut it to one year,” Nicolet said.

Nicolet said that while automation is reducing the need to hire large number of people, it does call for more skilled workforce, and steps such as these would help the company achieve that.

Capgemini is also working with Massive open online course providers to offer industry recognized certificates on different technologies that it’ll train its employees on, so that the certificate remains useful to the employee even after he quits the company.

Commenting on visa restrictions in the US, Nicolet said it would be really hard to implement for US because the country lacks skillsets and the only way to work is to allow skilled workforce from outside.

“You can put barriers but you have to look inside and see what is available. Today we discuss a lot about the visa but in BPOs, you dont need to send people on client location. But what if they impose tax on importing services. As long as you can deliver the services and you're not taxed, visa question may not impact our BPO operations,” Nicolet said.

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