BANGALORE: Train them, keep them seems to be emerging as the new mantra for IT companies to retain their employees.
Training budgets have nearly doubled across companies as the headcount continues to increase. Between them, the top five Indian firms — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and Satyam — and MNCs like IBM India, Accenture and EDS, are expected to add more than 1 lakh employees this fiscal alone. This means that they better have their training machines switched on as well.
India’s two biggest IT players TCS and Infosys Technologies currently spend about 4 per cent of their total revenues on training. Infosys has, in fact, said that the company spent $5,000 per fresher in FY07. Wipro spends 2 per cent of its revenues on training.
According to industry sources, the rising headcount in each of these companies has meant that the amount spent on training employees, often freshers, has gone up. In some cases like Accenture India (which currently has about 35,000 people) and Cognizant, the training budgets have doubled this year, sources added. And that’s not all, bigger companies are also outsourcing their training initiatives to training majors like NIIT.