Mindtree finds humane fix to automation – Economic Times

BENGALURU: Mid-tier IT firm Mindtree says that the company has taken a more humane approach in its roadmap for automation by upskilling and reskilling its workforce, but the larger concern will be to find skilled professionals to fill new jobs.

Say there are five jobs that are lost (due to automation), but there are 10 more roles that are created. Preparing our students for the new roles is the challenge, said KM Madhusudhan, CTO, Mindtree. The bigger concern to me is lesser job creation and not job loss, he said.

Indian IT is currently going through a whirlwind because of rapid technological change with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Insecurity due to job losses of experienced employees has plagued the market fuelling concerns over new age technologies siphoning off traditional jobs. According to some estimates, the top four Indian IT services companies may let go 12,000 -15,000 employees in the coming months. Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar has pointed out that in the outsourcing industry 50-60% requirement will be new-age skills.

Companies are in fact, witnessing the early stages of new roles being created. For instance, technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are increasingly being adopted by many enterprises for multiple business processes.

We have been working on VR/AR solutions. Though the mainstream adoption of AR/VR might not happen in the next three years, there are new roles like avatar designer a skilled professional who can create new avatars in virtual reality being created, Madhusudhan said.

The Bengaluru-based IT company prides itself on being born digital with close to 40% of their revenues coming from new generation technologies like cloud, automation, etc. or in business speak SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud).

To tackle the problem of old jobs turning obsolete, Mindtree has developed a curriculum to find adjacent skills to the jobs that are fast eroding. For every competency and job portfolio, we are identifying adjacent skills and are defining the entire upskilling and reskilling roadmap for every role, Madhusudhan said.

For example, the job of an infrastructure engineer who monitors servers and runs codes when the server goes down is now being automated. The next level of adjacent skills for that person is writing scripts. So, we teach him scripting skills since the person may not have an engineering background to know code.

The software company counts the likes of Microsoft and US-based American International Group (AIG) amongst its top clients and employs close to 16,623 employees with a net addition of 320 people in the quarter ended march 2017. In the last three months alone 4,774 have completed certified courses in Mindtrees reskilling platform Yorbit. The skilling platform introduced in July 2016 has trained 10,463 at a project ready level covering 481skills from basic vocational training to high-end skills like Hadoop, data Science, ML, AI etc.

Sometimes this reskilling happens just in time before starting a new project. Say we are starting a new project which we need 10 skills out of which we only have six, then we train employees on the four new skills and then deploy them on project, Madhusudhan said, adding they have partnered with Coursera, Udemy, Simplilearn amongst others to support the skilling programme. While the strides to reskill employees are happening on one side, the company has been focused on leveraging automation. Eight months ago, Mindtree developed its in-house automation platform CAPE which has gained a lot of traction.

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Mindtree finds humane fix to automation - Economic Times