While Infosys’ average training hours per employee fell from 130 in FY23 to 74.6 in FY24, Tech Mahindra saw average hours decline from 56 to 49 over the same time.Wipro’s total training hours also fell to 12.9 million in FY24 from 16 million in the year-ago period.
Industry analysts attribute this reduction in learning hours to a reduced intake of freshers and a shift towards just-in-time hiring. Due to sluggish demand and clients pulling back on discretionary spending, Indian IT firms are gradually onboarding freshers who were offered letters in the last fiscal and have made only modest additions to their headcount.
Freshers typically undergo extensive training when they join any IT firm, and when calculating training hours, companies consider both online and offline modules completed by employees. For instance, TCS – which hired 40,000 fresh graduates – more than doubled its training hours to 87 hours per employee in FY24, up from 40 in the year-ago period.
An email sent to TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL didn’t elicit a response till the time of going to press as they are in a quiet period.
Even during 2021, which was marred by a pandemic-related sharp decline in growth, the Indian tech sector added 1.3 lakh employees, taking the total base to 4.4 million. The net addition of 60,000 comes nowhere close to the hiring frenzy in FY22, when 4.5 lakh freshers were onboarded by employers – the highest addition in a single year. However, only two years later in FY24, the combined headcount of Infosys, Wipro, and TCS dropped by nearly 64,000.
Richard Lobo, chief people officer at Tech Mahindra, said that this decline is temporary and that the company expects an increase in employee upskilling as it focuses on cost optimisation.
“Overall training hours are down as project loads are light and staff levels remain tight. This has led to a focus on billable hours and revenue in the short run, versus training in the long run,” said Ray Wang, founder of IT advisory Constellation Research. Wang said that TCS is the only company focusing on a long-term strategy rather than pursuing short-term benefits.
