Here, each year, thousands of graduates from all over the world come for a mandatory residential training-cum-foundation programme, after which they will be sent to Infy’s offices and subsidiaries worldwide.

Cut to Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital and an emerging hotspot for India’s IT beavers. Here, at a sprawling 58,000-square feet campus, fresh recruits at India’s largest IT services provider, Tata Consultancy Services, go through the grind in a facility that houses 18 classrooms and includes language labs that teach French, Japanese, German and Spanish. The TCS Learning and Development Centre, with a dedicated faculty of 150, now trains 650-800 people at one go, and is well underway for an expansion that will house three times this number when complete.

Every year, companies such as Infosys and TCS, and increasingly, old-economy powerhouses, are spending big bucks to raise the employability quotient, re-train existing employees and groom staff to take on leadership roles within their organisations.

Take, for example, this recent joint study by information technology industry lobby Nasscom and global management consulting giant McKinsey, on the training needs of India’s booming IT sector. The study has pegged the possible shortfall in the sector at 500,000 within the next three years. For an industry where only 30% of the graduating fraternity each year is "employable," that number is a huge deficit.

"Infosys incurred a capex of Rs 1,600 crore on its Mysore facility"-  Mohandas Pai Director, HR & Member, Infosys Board

Not just employability, but other factors, too, are determining why companies have gone all-out on their training needs. Says Muralidhar Rao, President and Chief Operating Officer of NIS Sparta, India’s largest learning and training company: "The most obvious reason is the emergence of new products and service lines requiring specific skills that are not readily available. Then, there is the problem of competition and rising employee attrition." They are reasons enough for companies such as Infosys to spend high on its training needs. The company incurred a capital expenditure of Rs 1,600 crore on its Mysore centre, says Mohandas Pai, Director, HR of Infosys, adding that the 16-week training programme that each new recruit undergoes at Mysore costs $5,000 per trainee. And the effort seems to be paying off. Others, like Vijay Mallya’s UB Group, are also not far behind. Early this year, Mallya launched the Rs

Service industry in India spends an average 2% revenues on training. The corporate expenditure on training equals one month’s salary at the entry level

10-crore Kingfisher Training Academy in Mumbai to groom customer relations professionals for new-age industries like aviation, hospitality and retail. The academy, where students undergo a six-month training programme, boasts of a mock Airbus A-320, a food & beverage service laboratory and grooming suites. Mallya is now planning to start a pilot training school, the Kingfisher Aviation University, spending Rs 200 crore. "Customer expectations are increasing and that calls for training to deliver better. Skill upgradation is high on an employee wishlist today and companies are taking cognisance of this," says Rao of NIS Sparta.

Even senior managers are playing a hands-on role in a company’s learning initiatives. For instance, Wipro Chairman Azim Premji takes a keen interest in the organisation’s training programmes, giving it due place in the organisational strategy, says D Selvan, Senior Vice President, Talent & Transformation at Wipro. NR Narayana Murthy, Founder, Chairman and Chief Mentor of Infosys is also closely involved with its training initiatives. "The Global Education Centre is his baby, anyway," says Pai. That is a welcome development, considering that the management pool coming out of India’s B-schools is facing questions of employability. A study by MeritTrac Services, an assessments player, on the MBA talent pool in the country, has noted that "only 23% of the management talent is employable."

While official statistics are unavailable, Rao says the services industry in India spends an average 2% revenues on training and learning. In terms of cost-to-the-company or CTC, corporate spend on training and education equals one month’s salary at the entry level and 5% of an employee’s CTC at the mid-level. "This is a definite improvement over the last one decade. And it will get better," says Rao.

For the IT majors, the numbers are quite significant. TCS, the largest white-collar recruiter in the

"Learning is a prime mover for the company’s revenue"-  S Padmanabhan Executive Vice president, HR TCS

country with an employee base of nearly 89,500, spends 4% of its turnover on training and education annually. That is a cool $172 million—if you consider the amount it spent on training its staff in fiscal 2007, when TCS’s revenue was $4.3 billion. "Our business is driven by competency. So, learning, which involves acquiring competency and bridging competency gaps, becomes a prime mover for the company’s revenue," explains S Padmanabhan, Executive Vice President and Global Head, Human Resources. For Wipro, the numbers are calculated differently. Each of Wipro’s 69,000 employee spends 5% of his billable time on training every year. A quick back-of-the-book calculation for 2,000 billable hours in a year at an average billing rate of $20-22 per hour shows that the company spent $2,000-2,200 per person on training, which adds up to between 4 and 4.3% of the company’s annual revenue (Rs 15,000 crore in 2007).

For the information technology-enabled services (ITES) and business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, employee training is becoming even more crucial, especially since the sector has routine access to critical client information. A number of companies have gone on record saying their training budgets will increase manifold over the next couple of years.

Aniruddha Limaye, Chief People Officer of WNS Global Services, says, "In our industry it is very important to train employees at all levels—be it simple data entry work or high-end accounting using US GAAP or travel desk associates."

Not just IT, but also people-oriented sectors such as aviation, retail, banking and finance are facing an employability demand-supply mismatch. And so, even old economy companies are stepping in a big way.

"Customer expectations are increasing, and that calls for more training to deliver"-  Muralidhar Rao, President & Coo, NIS Sparta.

The Godrej Group has invested in the Godrej Sales Academy to stem the flow of sales people into more lucrative sectors such as telecom services. Then there is the ONGC Academy in Dehradun that runs training programmes for graduate trainees, middle and senior-level executives. Apollo Hospitals has also set up a world-class nursing school on a 30-acre campus in Hyderabad that is aimed at plugging the demand-supply mismatch of trained nurses in India. Citibank and Standard Chartered have set up specialised training facilities in sales and services. These bring us to the question: Is all this training necessary? Lokesh Mehra, Regional Manager, Corporate Responsibility of Cisco, explains: "Our engineering programmes cover almost all aspects of technology without delving too deep into the subject. As a result, students have a decent knowledge of hardware, software, programming and networks but are unable to do any research-breaking work or meaningful problem-solving mechanisms." Mehra says training is also necessary for soft skills and team-building which do not form part of any college curriculum. That is is why India Inc is partnering with academia to meet their needs.

"Despite having the world’s largest stock of scientists, engineers and technicians, we are not able to derive full benefits from this talent base," Bhupesh Lall, Education Programme Manager of Autodesk, the world’s largest supplier of computer-based design tools, notes. "There is a mismatch between the skillset needs of industry and the output of the university system. Hence, it is crucial to nurture the right skill-sets by making provisions for multidisciplinary education at the student level," he says.

Autodesk has launched Centres of Excellence at five premier design schools in India. Similarly, global storage major EMC has launched the EMC Academy Programme (EAP) to build a resource pool of industry-ready, skilled and certified storage professionals.

"Graduates leave education with inspiring theoretical knowledge but they lack practical skills. Also, a soft-skills gap is developing as companies seek better communication, client relationship management, customer services, business awareness and problem solving skills," a report by KPMG and UK-India Education and Research Initiative points out.