Capgemini India starts appraisals across job roles, promotes 11,000

Capgemini, the Paris-headquartered information technology major, has started quarterly appraisals for its employees in India. This is part of an attempt to leverage its offshore workforce more and more.

“We launched quarterly promotion cycles for non-freshers. Traditionally, the industry has always done quarterly promotions for freshers but we started doing it for laterals, and in the past nine months, we have done upwards of 11,000 promotions. We will have one more round in the March cycle,” Ashwin Yardi, chief executive officer at Capgemini India, told Business Standard.

At end-December, it had 211,300 employees globally, of which close to half or 106,000 were based out of India.

The company has said it plans to increase its India headcount in “mid-single digits” and stem staff attrition in the digital skills talent, where attrition is high. In the December quarter, the attrition rose 310 basis points from a year before, to 22 per cent.

Yardi said the challenge was to keep a young workforce motivated and to prevent such churn.

The company had launched a curriculum called ‘Automation Engineer’ in India, then doing so globally. “It trains employees to pick up a lot of new automation skills. Using those skills will probably cannibalise what they do but it gives them a much robust road map for the future. Last year, we had over 45,000 employees go through new skills. There are many more who went through regular skills,” he said.

Capgemini is also looking at “internal rotation” of employees to ensure they have a career progression path.

Over the past three quarters of 208-19, Indian IT services companies have seen a huge demand uptick. This has forced them to spend more on talent acquisition, including onsite hiring and hiring of subcontractors. Many companies are mitigating its impact on their profit margin by offering clients more location-independent services and leveraging their offshore resources more.

Reskilling employees in new skills such as automation, data science and so on has been an ongoing theme for the IT services sector for the past couple of years. The National Association of Software and Services Companies has said the industry now has over 600,000 digitally skilled professionals.

Digital was growth driver for the industry during the year, growing 30 per cent on an annual basis and is estimated at $33 billion in 2018-19.