Wipro gives training push for digital journey

 Wipro, the third largest IT services company in the country, underwent a transformational journey during FY 2016, led by its learning and development team to take on the digital challenges.

“Based on the evolution of technology, customer and market dynamics, Wirpo’s learning and development (L & D) team launched multiple programmes to up-skill and re-skill employees in technical as well as behavioural competencies,” states the company in its Annual Report for FY 2016.

“Employees built their capabilities through e-learning modules, expert and peer learning, project training, webinar participation, outbound training, on-job learning and mentoring,” the report adds.

The company also witnessed impetus on assessments for key roles and specialists, and enablement of the sales teams through sales training workshops. “One key area of focus has been to ensure that our employees are trained in digital and quickly deployed. Approximately 15,000 employees trained through an innovative platform called ‘Future Ready’ for building awareness on digital technologies for all customer-facing roles,” the report states.

Over 20,000 employees trained on core digital technologies through Digital Foundation Academy. “Over 4,000 employees benefited from a programme called Cutting EDGE, which trained employees on advanced skills for digital transformation, such as digital architecture, big data, analytics and mobile apps development,” states the company.

Through the Train to Bill initiative, employees, whose projects are nearing end or are between projects to be deployed to new projects, are imparted ‘Just In Time’ training to suit the needs of the new project. The training is provided to address skill gaps so that the employee can then be deployed in new project opportunities. This initiative aligns training to the business demand and helps in rapidly ful­filling customer requirements.

For a number of capability building programmes, enterprise social networking service from Yammer has been used extensively for social learning. After classroom training, the faculty use this platform to engage with the participants for continued learning.

“To generate interest, we launched a competition across the various groups in Yammer and the groups were measured on the number of discussion threads and responses, as well as the quality of the posts. Over a period of just six months, more than 8,000 employees participated in learning groups, posting 85,000 threads of discussion,” adds the report.