Wipro wins award for employee training

Wipro Technology has been awarded by the Amerian Society for Training and Development (ASTD) for its employee training and development activities.

Wipro was ranked sixth among the 39 companies, which won the ASTD's BEST awards. Wipro has won the award for the third year in a row. ASTD is an association dedicated to workplace learning.

Seven other Indian companies, including Reliance Petroleum, Infosys Technologies, ICICI Bank and Hindustan Petroleum also won the award. Reliance Petroleum made it to the top five.

The award is given to companies based on the evidence that the employee training programmes have added to the companies' overall performance and that the companies have made a significant investment in building talent.

BEST is an acronym for 'build talent enterprise wide, supported by the leaders, through learning'.

"The award winners are chosen from amongst 71 entries from across the world and the winners set the standards for excellence and foster a good learning culture," ASTD's senior director of Public Relations and Public Policy Jennifer Homer said.

Wipro said its intensive talent transformation programme had helped them win the award. The company spends one per cent of its total revenue on training.

The company has eight dedicated employee training centres with four in Bangalore. These centres impart training in HR, leadership skills, behavioural skills and cross-culture training.

The centres train about 3,500 employees daily. Talent Transformation division's senior vice-president Selvan D says the programmes have actually helped retain people.

"I think behavioural skills is what is most needed. People have a lot of technical knowledge but inter-personnel skills are usually lacking," Selvan said.

Wipro also has a dedicated learning centre for its Japanese businesses, in Chennai.

"The Japanese market is the hardest to penetrate and also very complicated. We try to make sure that we teach our employees their culture," he added.