Mindtree takes case-study route to skilling new hands

For several years, the IT industry has been lamenting about the poor job-readiness of fresh graduates. After hiring thousands from campuses, they claimed, they had to spend valuable resources on training before inducting them in projects.

Now, IT consulting firm Mindtree wants to change this approach. After studying ancient learning methods employed at Taxila and other gurukuls and at top global business schools, it has decided to adopt the ‘case study’ method to drive collaboration among its future employees.

“As the world moves towards automation, you will require a different set of skills. You need people who can collaborate to solve tomorrow’s complex problems,” Parthasarathy NS, Founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Mindtree, told BusinessLine .

Parthasarathy, who also takes care of the People Function, the company’s global learning centre in Bhubaneswar, says the days of the traditional classroom learning are over. “Like they do in business schools, we give case studies to our new recruits, who then share their understanding with one another,” he says.

“You give a case study to five people, and each of them understands about 65 per cent of it, depending on their backgrounds. Through collaboration and by sharing their individual understanding through debate, the level of understanding can be driven up to 85-95 per cent,” he notes.

The centre deploys an IT algorithm that picks a team of people with different backgrounds before giving them a case study. “It needs to be heterogeneous to drive discussion,” he pointed out.

“The centre can train about 400-500 people at a time for a 90-day session. We can train 2,000 people a year,” he added.

The firm says the challenge of skill gap is not confined to India. “It is a global phenomenon,” he said.

Will automation kill IT jobs in lakhs? Parthasarathy feels it’s a doomsday prediction and there’s no need to lose sleep over it. “It is not going to kill jobs in large numbers. It only drives people to do more intelligent activities. We are doing rudimentary work now. This will go,” he pointed out.

“You will become obsolete if you don’t acquire newer skill sets,” he cautioned.

This, he said, applies not just to new recruits. “Even existing employees need to understand this. No matter how long you have been in the industry, you need to adapt to the newer demands,” he pointed out.

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