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By Saritha Rai, 23 June 2009 12:02

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Â… customers but also draw the best and brightest of talent. In recent years, competition among companies for skilled engineers has been intense, driving up salaries to dizzying levels and resulting in double-digit attrition rates.

Even if some of that competition has slowed due to the current economic recession, one constant is that Infosys has to train its hires to not just write impeccable code and design software for customers such as Boeing, Cisco Systems, General Motors and Wal-Mart but also turn them into savvy employees capable of holding their own in the global workplace.

"It is important that our employees come across as polished and poised because ours is an industry where each employee is just one step away from the end consumer," says Infosys's Vaidya.

Trainees are taught to hold a conversation with international customers, conduct meetings and acquire social graces. "Besides domain knowledge, there is a whole different learning in eating with a fork and knife, wearing a tie and writing an official email," says Shamsul Afaq, a 23-year-old mechanical engineer who was hired by Infosys from his college campus outside Delhi.

Like Ramamoorthy and Afaq, most trainees are hired straight from India's engineering schools. They are in their twenties, attentive and enthusiastic. Not surprisingly, the college campus feel extends to the training centre. Men and women are segregated in different blocks, weeknight curfew at the gates is 9.30pm, mobile phones are banned in classrooms and alcohol is a no-no on campus at all times.

India's technology revolution has been powered mostly by its educated, opportunity-hungry middle class. For many trainees who come from modest, even working-class backgrounds, an appointment letter from Infosys is a passport to affluence and a future beyond what their parents could dream of.

At the training campus, fresh hires spend eight-hour days in the classroom learning to design software, work in teams and deal with foreign customers. Sundar K S, group manager of the global education centre, says: "They learn that they cannot walk into a colleague's office unannounced or call a customer on his mobile phone unless it is an absolute emergency."

The global recession has made many outsourcing customers extremely cost and value-conscious. In keeping with the demands of the market, the five-month Infosys training schedule has just been lengthened to seven months. "Until now, each fresh hire was trained in one technology but versatility is key so we are now training them in multiple skills," says Sundar.

The classrooms are high-tech, with software allowing the teacher to capture the work of individual trainees on his console. In an effort to go green, many tasks such as self-assessment tests are automated and carried out digitally. Even attendance is recorded via biometrics, with each trainee pressing four fingers of both hands onto their computer screen.

The training covers five aspects: technology, quality standards, processes, IP and soft skills. The training modules simulate the Infosys production environment. Most of the learning is driven through case studies. The campus has 500 'educators', as the trainers are called. A dozen of them are PhDs.

The onset of the recession has brought on pay freezes and job cuts across the industry and Infosys has been touched, too. That makes the pressures at the training campus even more intense. Trainees spend hours after class studying code and completing projects and group assignments. It is hard to spot trainees floating in the pool or throwing the ball in the bowling alley on weeknights.

To graduate successfully, every 'fresher', as the college hires are called, must pass comprehensive exams at the end of each weekly module. Modules are graded US school-style and toppers can score a maximum of a 5.0 GPA. About five per cent of the hires don't make it through the training.

Over the years, Infosys has been fine-tuning its training model. It runs an on-going retraining programme for its employees where about 80,000 employees get certified every year. During the recession, the model has matured to accommodate higher numbers of 'benched' employees. "When the upturn happens, we will be ready with completely reskilled employees," says Vaidya.

Seated that afternoon at the lunch table at the floating restaurant, trainees Ramamoorthy and Afaq are a picture of poise and polish. Both have topped their training batch with impressive 5.0 GPA's and await allocation to different business units. They said they cannot wait to get started.