Upskilling Campus Hires for a Leading IT Giant

Problem Statement:

Every year, a leading Indian IT giant - let's call it Company A - hires several thousand fresh engineering graduates from colleges across India. Since the recruits come from diverse engineering streams and regions across India, a significant disparity is witnessed in their core skill levels. For obvious reasons, students from some streams do better than the othersto complete the post-joining training program.

As a result, candidates from other streams suffer from loss of confidence and suboptimal learning outcome, which leads to poor on-the-job productivity. Witnessing the magnitude of the problem, the company soon realized that it was absolutely imperative to minimize the skill disparity among fresh hires.

Company A started evaluating various training organizations for a Pre-Joining Program (PJP), which would bring all their fresh hires at par. In their process of search and evaluation, they came across Manipal Prolearn, one of the leading providers of cutting-edge learning solutions for the rapidly evolving IT industry.

Solution:

Manipal Prolearn, a leading learning solutions provider comprising veteran academic and IT industry professionals quickly identified the customer pain-points. An online Pre-Joining Program was devised to impart foundation courses on various technologies to the fresh hires spread across the diverse regions in India.

Manipal Prolearn achieved this by using their Learning Management Platform - EduNxt, a cloud hosted solution providing anytime-anywhere access to the learners. Students enrolled online as soon as the company offered them a job. The pre-joiner program helped the client attain three clear goals:

1. Engage remote fresh hires
2. Bring all candidates at par in terms of skill requirements before they joined the company
3. Help the client identify the brightest candidates to bring them on-board quickly

The course content and pedagogy were tailored to suit the learning methods of the target group, extensive training modules in various technologies  – audio-visual resources, self-help tools etc.to name a few.

“Even students from non-IT branches like me could understand the concepts, as everything was explained from the basics. Webinars held once/twice a week helped me understand the subjects better. To have our doubts cleared then and there by interacting with the professionals in the field was a big help. Demo-based videos were also more interesting.”

 – Fresh Hire

Program Highlights

The program comprised the weekly webinar, conducted by the faculty and experienced professionals. Candidates got a chance to build their coding skills in various languages on Manipal Prolearn's proprietary coding platform.

Spread over 12 weeks, the inaugural PJP program for the IT giant (Company A) trained nearly 1,500 candidates from 41 colleges across a range of subjects. During this time, the “active learners” spent more than 233,000 hours online and attended 53 webinars.

At the end of the program, specially designed assessments tested the candidates on a variety of metrics such as the ability to build logic and apply programming concepts, among others. Candidates needed to score at least 60 percent marks on the assessments, which included a hands-on coding evaluation.

The Outcome:

The PJP program was a great success in improving the technical skills of candidates. It helped even the candidates  without a computer science background. The pedagogy, which drew upon methods ranging from online learning and“hands on” practical programming sessions to tutoring through webinars, contributed greatly to the fact that more than 90 percent of learners achieved the desired outcome in the final assessment.

Company A was now able to:

• Save on training costs
• Accelerate the deployment of new recruits
• Improvethe joining rates

Buoyed by the results of the first PJP, Company A mandated Manipal Prolearn to train the succeeding batches of fresh recruits. Furthermore, the program is currently underway, and already promises to exceed the performance of the initial program.

About the Author:

Arvind Thothadri
Vice President
Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE)

Arvind Thothadri is the Vice President at Manipal Global Education Services. A post graduate from IIM - Lucknow with about 20 years experience, Arvind has spent the last 10 years in leadership roles advocating technology in Learning, Training and Assessment with customers across the globe.