Companies must take ownership for skilling: Anuraag Maini

If I look at the number of institutes, the supply side is increasing, as a large number of students are being churned out, but the quality often is below the mark, especially in tier two and tier three cities. Therefore, the efforts required to place these students is going up. With respect to quality of candidates, the problem is still very large because many institutes do not necessarily have the required experience or depth to produce people with the required skills and many students are not readily employable. Hence, skill development is increasingly becoming the responsibility of the organization. Since organizations are short of skilled people, they have to design programs aimed at building management skills, providing industry specific knowledge, and providing coaching and mentorship for the first few months of a fresher’s joining. This enables the person to become successful in the role he/she has been hired for, though the development process requires patience.

When hiring freshers, we seek the right attributes that are a part of personality and are not trainable. For example, attributes like perseverance, a winning attitude, having the fire in the belly, passion, caring nature, etc. We also assess the basic level of knowledge while skills are imparted during the induction and training period.

This year for the first time, we have hired 24 management trainees and they are being put through a 2-month training program that includes both classroom and fieldwork. Thereafter, they will be assigned to roles where they will have an opportunity to learn on-the-job in a sales role and deliver outcomes. They will also work on projects related to other functions to broaden their knowledge. This process takes about 9 months.

This training requires substantial investment of money before MTs become productive. The total salary cost of these MTs is about 5.5 lakh and the training and overhead costs are about two and half times the MTs’ salary. However, we are committed to these investments in building talent as this will help us develop leaders to take the organization into the future.