IT hiring: HCL Technologies to increase Lucknow headcount by 50%

Company has already invested Rs 500 crore in Lucknow

Sounding bullish on fresh hiring, IT bellwether HCL Technologies plans to expand the capacity of its Lucknow development centre by over 50 per cent.

The country's third largest IT services company is targetting to augment the headcount of the Lucknow centre, also referred to as Lucknow IT City, to almost 3,500 by the end of this fiscal compared to 2,300 people at the end of 2017-18 financial year.

"The infrastructure that we have already created in the Lucknow centre has the capacity to cater the bench strength of almost 5,500," HCL executive vice president and program director (New Vistas) Sanjay Gupta told Business Standard here.

He informed the Lucknow centre, spread over a campus of 100 acres, currently caters to about 81 global clients, including Fortune 500 and 1,000 companies as well.

"The Lucknow centre is bigger than our Noida centre in terms of the campus size, since the Noida hub is spread over an area of 50 acres," he added. The Noida centre, however, houses around 25,000 professionals compared to HCL’s largest development hub in Chennai, which seats nearly 35,000 people.

While, HCL had announced to invest Rs 1,500 crore in Lucknow, so far the company has already invested nearly Rs 500 crore in the local centre. When fully completed, Lucknow IT City was earlier projected to provide direct jobs to 25,000 people with indirect employment potential of nearly 50,000. The project had been granted a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) status by the Centre.

"We have set up a skill development centre in Lucknow and are in the process of creating housing infrastructure now," he added.

Gupta sounded bullish about the untapped human capital in the region and stressed the commitment of HCL Tech to groom young professionals to come on board for servicing global clients from the Lucknow centre.

HCL has an ongoing talent sourcing, training and hiring programme to ramp up its bench strength. The company has tied up with BITS Pilani to aid higher education and skilling of young workforce by subsidising 50% of tuition fee for perusing B Tech and M Tech courses.

According to estimates, Lucknow region produces 20,000 engineers annually, but only a small percentage of them are considered readily ‘employable’, since they lack the requisite skills set, including soft and technical skills.

HCL Lucknow centre had started its operations in October 2016 and is touted to be in line with the IT major’s strategic roadmap to expand in smaller towns of India and provide training and employment opportunities to the youth.

The incumbent Yogi Adityanath government is also looking to promote the IT sector beyond the realms of the Noida and Greater Noida for creating mass job opportunities.

Meanwhile, HCL Tech is sponsoring the 4th edition of ‘HCL City Half Marathon’ in Lucknow on Sunday.