WIPRO LIMITED | BANGALORE, INDIA

10-TIME WINNER

23

Wipro’s five-point
talent strategy is
tightly linked to
the company’s
strategic plan.

74 TD | October 2016

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 podcast

Educating Employees for a

Rapidly
Evolving
Business
Environment

BY JENNIFER J. SALOPEK

W
hen Vishwas Santurkar assumed his role as vice president and head of
talent transformation at Wipro 2.5 years ago, after 21 years with the
company, he was given a mandate for change: to ensure that employees
had the multiple skills required to serve customers around the globe in the face
of rapidly advancing technology; to excel in the digital world, as contributors and
learners; and to use advanced technology to reach and train Wipro’s global work-
force of more than 170,000. The talent transformation organization, which numbers
more than 400, adeptly stepped up to the challenge.
Learning has long had a seat at the strategic table at Wipro, helping to set en-
terprise strategy in two essential ways: by training senior leaders about business
strategy during annual sessions that precede strategic planning exercises; and by as-
sessing concomitant talent needs during the formulation of enterprise strategies.
“Assessment of employees’ technical and behavioral competencies for Wipro to
achieve planned goals is a crucial input from the talent development function in
the formulation of enterprise strategy,” Santurkar says. “Further, we work closely
with business unit leaders to identify critical talent needs and the role that they
can play in helping business units succeed.”

PHOTO: STALIN RAMESH October 2016 | TD 75

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Pictured on pages 74-75:
Subrahmanyam P., Chief,
Global Delivery Enablement;
Vishwas Santurkar, Vice
President, Talent Transforma-
tion; Abidali Z. Neemuchwala,
CEO and Member of the Board;
Saurabh Govil, President, HR;
Bhanumurthy B.M., President
and COO
76 TD | October 2016
BEST_74-85.indd 76
LEARNING HAS LONG HAD A SEAT AT THE STRATEGIC TABLE AT WIPRO,
HELPING TO SET ENTERPRISE STRATEGY.
The company’s talent strategy has five core
elements:
• Hire the right talent.
• Foster a learning environment to nurture
and enable employees to be best in class.
• Be fair, progressive, and consistent in tal-
ent management processes.
• Listen to employees and put feedback
into action.
• Encourage diversity and inclusion.
Informed by the strategic plan, the learn-
ing organization designs enterprise learning
plans based on the talent strategy to deliver
large-scale training programs. Learning solu-
tions are directed at employees working on
active customer engagements that require
more than 4,500 skills across competency
dimensions. These are supplemented by
capability-building programs and dynamic,
need-based learning initiatives.
Although 68 percent of training is still de-
livered in the classroom by a live instructor,
programs are increasingly focused on and de-
livered via the disruptive technologies—social,
mobile, analytics, and cloud, often with gamifi-
cation thrown in—that have come to encompass
“digital.” They comprise the company’s most
innovative learning initiative of the past year.
“Our industry is undergoing a transforma-
tion in the type of business we are doing and
the technology required to do it. The kinds of
skills our employees need are changing very
fast,” Santurkar explains. “We have a strong
business pipeline, and need to get our employ-
ees trained quickly.”
The learning function has designed and
developed unique programs, including Future
Ready, an innovative platform for building
awareness in digital technologies for all
customer-facing roles. It delivers weekly
training modules (webinars) on new technolo-
gies, company capabilities, and customer
case studies.
“Currently, many of our employees are work-
ing on projects that don’t require digital skills,”
Santurkar notes. “We realized that in order for
our employees to be digitally fit, they would
need to learn those skills, then work on hands-
on projects to facilitate their deployment.”
Top Gear is an open-source platform used
for providing hands-on experience. It is in-
tegrated with the enterprise social media
platform Yammer, which enables teams across
different groups and geographies to collabo-
rate and learn. Gamification techniques such as
leaderboards encourage and reward key con-
tributors. “The open-source aspect ensures
easy integration of technologies and includes
tools for customization. It is a very cohesive ap-
proach,” Santurkar says.
The Digital Academy was designed to cre-
ate technologists who can build and deploy
Internet-scale applications. Participation
is selective and competitive, via a specially
designed challenge to assess participants’ ana-
lytical thinking, problem solving, and coding
skills. The rigorous three-month program in-
cludes curriculums in programming languages,
technology, engineering processes, and tools.
“It is designed to foster entrepreneurship,
design thinking, and high performance through
its immersive simulation of a real start-up en-
vironment with a challenging problem and an
aggressive timeline,” says Santurkar. Business
results have been impressive: The number of
certified “digital-ready” employees at Wipro has
increased by 100 percent.
The learning organization facilitated the
growth of that pipeline by equipping sales
and customer-facing employees with new
skills. “With a view to creating more sales op-
portunities, differentiating our offerings, and
closing more deals by improving sales con-
versations, we initiated a unique selling skills
course based on the science behind how the
brain makes decisions,” Santurkar explains.
The course, “Power Messaging,” uses a blended
learning approach that includes an e-learning
course, a two-day instructor-led program, and
just-in-time post-training reinforcement over
six months.
Jennifer J. Salopek is a freelance writer in McLean,
Virginia; jjsalopek@cox.net.
9/22/16 3:15 PM
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