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Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Wipro training 20k unicorns in e-push

Wipro is building an army of Unicorns that can bounce between code and design as it moves into the new world of artificial intelligence, analytics and robotics. 
India's third-largest IT services company is training 20,000 employees to become what it calls Unicorns — people who have a breadth of technology knowledge to define the big picture — as the battle for highly-skilled digital workforce is getting fierce. 
"You need to be able to handle multiple technologies and handle them as one person. We call them the Unicorn, a person who can handle anything from design to deployment. That's the skill-set you need. We have quite a few unicorns, but we need 15,000-20,000 of them to make an impact. That's what we are after," Wipro CEO TK Kurien said. 
Wipro is accelerating hunt for unicorns as it aggressively moves towards the new digital technology imperatives — automation, artificial intelligence and analytics — altering the way traditional IT services are delivered. 
"What Wipro and others are finding out is that these technologies converge and that client problems require an inter-disciplinary skill set. These talented individuals are indeed rare and very hard to obtain from the market. Hence a grow your own strategy makes a lot of sense, what this underlines is that with every increase in technology service providers have to investment more in human capital not less," said Peter Bendor Samuel, CEO of US-based Everest Group. 
Experts tracking the sector believe the big shift going on with firms like Wipro is from "skills" to "capabilities". "In the recent past, the IT services majors would recruit staff which had expertise skills tied to specific IT product and development areas. Today, those skills are relatively commonplace and easy to acquire at diminishing price points," said Phil Fersht, CEO of US-based HFS Research. 
He feels companies like Wipro are making considerable investments in recruiting staff with mathematics degrees, as opposed to computer sciences. "They have broader capabilities to pivot across process, technology, data domains more effectively and use more orthogonal thinking when needed," Fersht added. 
More recently, Wipro has carved out a new business unit — Wipro Digital — as it expects digital to become one of its top three service lines over the next three years, generating revenues of over $1 billion. 
Wipro's Kurien thinks digital forces are not only changing the IT services landscape, but the organization is gearing up to engage with the digitally-savvy workforce. "The employee of the future is no longer going to communicate on email, but rather write a short verse on Twitter. You've to pick it on social media and not from internal communications. The stability of the old business was positive for many years, but can be a deterrent if you don't change faster," Kurien added. 

To view the original press release, please click here.

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