By Dr. Vishnupriya Raghavan, Head, Products and Solutions, StackRoute, An NIIT venture
Around two decades after the first captive centre was set up in Bengaluru, India is now home to more than 1500 GCCs. Most of these are headquartered in the US but there are quite a few GCCs of companies from the EU, UK, South America, Chile, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East as well. With an adaptable talent pool, strong IT infrastructure, a conducive business ecosystem and exciting tax breaks – as is the case with the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) – it is no doubt that India has become a preferred destination for GCCs.
However, as GCCs move up the value chain within their organisations, they are also looked at globally to source quality talent, drive innovation and ensure great delivery and profitability. To achieve this, GCCs in India have developed a comprehensive digital strategy and are leading their way towards practical implementation of the same.
Reinventing the driving models
This digital penetration across verticals has also led corporations to rethink and reduce their footprint by converting working spaces into collaboration hubs, shrinking floors through hot-desking, and adapting to other modern practices of efficiency. In the recent virtually held fourth edition of NIIT’s India Confluence, an esteemed panel discussed at length how transformation and organizational capability plays a major role in boosting the growth of the Global Capability Centres. The discussion had several takeaways for those wanting to understand how to leverage digital innovation and transformation and most importantly, on skilling the workforce for the present and the future.
Training for the next
As GCCs continue to build and shape the services economy and turn into Technology Centers of Excellence (CoE), the need for hiring fresh talent as well as skilling the existing ones has only increased manifold. Meanwhile, as the pace of change keeps overriding the pace of learning, it is important to bear in mind that the shelf-life of technical skills is only fast depleting. Besides, new-age skills are not only limited to the technical domain but also expand into creativity, analytical and critical thinking and problem solving. That’s why most GCCs have shifted their focus to hiring as well as building hybrid skills capabilities into their workforces and are creating a culture of continuous learning to remaining competitive.
Over the years, there has been a spotlight on the importance of organisations to invest in career path design and learning and development. With a constantly evolving ecosystem , it is the collective duty of stakeholders across levels to ensure the enabling of an ecosystem which re-imagines future jobs and skills. Organisations need to work on consistently fostering relationships with key universities as well as build capabilities that feed into an environment of high-performing talent. As strategic learning solution providers, NIIT provides custom designed interventions for various roles including data scientists, architects, program managers, engineering managers, and full stack engineers to fill the talent gaps at GCCs. With our services like Talent Pipeline as a Service (TPaaS), we help build a pool of ready-to-deploy talent that organisations can bank on and gain a competitive advantage. In addition to this, at NIIT, we begin the transformation process by performing an in-depth analysis of business needs, and then tailor a learning intervention that meet the needs (IMPACT). At the same time, it also provides the flexibility to architect the learning intervention based on the gap analysis already identified and tracked through to program completion (ACT).
One of the primary goals of strategic learning solution providers like NIIT should be to not limit the goal of any learning design to simply developing the necessary “skills” and “competencies.” Programs must be designed to develop capabilities for a specific role, such as the ability to collaborate, face opposing arguments, learn, develop perspectives, reconcile conflicts, take a stand, adapt to change, nurture excellence, create value, and drive change. These characteristics are known as Transformative Competencies, and without them, talent cannot be transformed.
Every change and disruption serves as a wake-up call to each of us about our ability to learn and adapt to new trends in the environment. Building learning designs that focus on building capabilities and foster innovative thinking must be the key for organizations, regardless of the nature of approaches or the types of interventions (reskilling, upskilling, or competence building initiatives).
Talent is a distinctive differentiator for the GCCs, and nurturing talent is and will continue to be one of the most difficult challenges the GCCs face. There is no doubt that the future of the GCCs is bright; but only if we are willing to learn new technologies with an open mind.