For beating the BPO backlash, IT industry falls back on HR skills

These expectations are to be pursued ‘‘on a war footing,’’ says NASSCOM Chairman Sunil Mehta. ‘‘While national issues with infrastructure, such as telecom are being addressed, local infrastructure such as roads, airways and urban transport are now in severe need of capacity expansion,’’ he adds.

The association is also pushing for bandwidth on international scales. Countries leading the information technology bandwagon rarely face bandwidth inadequacy, it says, adding that both government and industry have been responsive to the war cry. A range of software training, BPO and security firms are now reworking human resource management to meet what is now being called ‘‘the new challenge.’’

EXL Services Human Resource (HR) head Deepak Dhawan says, ‘‘With the industry in a glasshouse, HR is at a turning point. At this point, we ensure we don’t give anyone reasons to complain. Apart from tightening up recruitment, the industry as a whole focuses on attuning workers to prevalent security and regulatory concerns.’’ While the IT Department says it is ‘‘working in close coordination with NASSCOM to ensure sensitivity to issues like the BPO backlash,’’ on paper, it has moved to try and re-orient education right from the primary to senior level, to create manpower with skills that new industries, including the ITES sector, will need. Private players are also being asked to re-orient their strategy.

‘‘Manpower development is important whether there is a backlash or not,’’ says tech trainer NIIT’s president, Arvind Thakur. ‘‘Indian BPO has differentiated itself by investing in processes that segregate job responsibilities on the basis on skill sets. For instance, a coder, an analyst and a manager require different skills, which India already has excellent quality in. The need now is to scale these capabilities — have excellent people in larger numbers.’’

Though the consequences of breach of trust or non-compliance to information security (IS) needs of a client are already declared to call centre workers, the focus is now on making the IS compliance a part of their training modules. ‘‘We already make sure employees understand the consequence of non-compliance.. but though the simple rules suffice anywhere in the world, creating an aware and committed industry is an ongoing task in India’s new industry,’’ says Dhawan. In coming days, a lot of training in Indian call centres is likely to be customised to client requirements where understanding needs will re-invent the focus of the industry. The emphasis will also shift to direct hiring from smaller towns where BPO has not filtered in yet.

‘‘Some of the leading industry players have reached an understanding among themselves like non-hiring applicants who have spent less than one year at a previous workplace or blacklisting agencies that actively poach on workers. NASSCOM will also reach out to Tier II and Tier III towns for industry to directly seek employees from interaction with schools, students and their parents,’’ says Mehta.