30 words
Over one million young people apply to Infosys for a job every year. About 15,000 are recruited through an automated process based not on what they can do for the company, but on learnability.
100 words
In the dining room of the Infosys campus in Bangalore, Jake Hu, a fresher from
Jiangxi province, is eating dosas with chopsticks. He is one of a hundred undergraduates from Beijing who has been invited to spend seven months training at
Infosys. He may or may not join the Indian software giant which is ramping up its operations in China. Even if Hu does not sign up, Infosys will have gained valuable knowledge about ways to find and train Chinese talent who possess that magical characteristic, learnability. It's a word coined by an Indian but a characteristic which can be found inside people all over the world.
Keywords: Infosys Technologies, K Dinesh, NS Raghavan, N R Narayana Murthy, information technology, software, learnability, recruit, enable, empower, retain, market capitalization, academic achievement, conceptual knowledge, temperament, multicultural
Authors Summary N R Narayana Murthy, K Dinesh, NS Raghavan infosys technologies: company as university
Over one million young people apply to Infosys for a job every year. About 15,000 are recruited through an automated process based not on what they can do for the company, but on learnability.
In the dining room of the Infosys campus in Bangalore, Jake Hu, a fresher from
Jiangxi province, is eating dosas with chopsticks. He is one of a hundred undergraduates from Beijing who has been invited to spend seven months training at
Infosys. He may or may not join the Indian software giant which is ramping up its operations in China. Even if Hu does not sign up, Infosys will have gained valuable knowledge about ways to find and train Chinese talent who possess that magical characteristic, learnability. It's a word coined by an Indian but a characteristic which can be found inside people all over the world.
K Dinesh and NS Raghavan along with N R Narayana Murthy began exploring the idea of learnability soon after Infosys was formed in July 1981, but the concept itself was formally embedded in the company's architecture over a decade later.
Learnability is defined as the ability to extract generic inferences from specific instances and using them in new, unstructured situations.
The concept evolved out of the need to define and articulate a company's strategic resources, and ensure their long term supply. In the case of IT companies, human intellect, technology and processes are the three key strategic resources. Murthy recognized that Infosys would operate in a domain where customer preferences and technology change rapidly and business models, paradigms and rules quickly become obsolete.

"The only constant for us is change," Murthy stressed from day one. "The world moves so fast that often the person who says that something cannot be done is proved wrong by another person who is already doing it. Our success at
Infosys depends on our ability to recognize, learn and assimilate these changes quickly, and on bringing business value to our customers by leveraging the assimilated knowledge." Thus learnability became a critical component of Infosys' recruitment strategy. from idea to implementation
Infosys began placing a premium on recruiting people with a high learnability quotient. A model was developed where candidates could be assessed on learnability through written tests that included mathematical and analytical questions geared towards assessing the aptitude of a person to derive generic patterns from a situation. Apart from the individual's ability to learn, selection is also based on a combination of academic achievement, conceptual knowledge, and the temperament for (and fit with) Infosys's culture.
An additional facet of learnability was grounded in the implicit belief that each person should surround himself or herself with much smarter people. Such an environment creates competition and confidence, and leads to energy and enthusiasm. Infosys fosters the growth of intellectual capital through interactions Infoscions have with each other. People learn from one another as they rotate from one project group or from one knowledge domain to another. It is also seen in the nested mentoring process where, at every level, Infoscions groom and teach those under them.
"We provide people with up-to-date technology and a strong foundation in processes.
Infosys' longevity will depend on how well we build on our people resources. The biggest challenge for a knowledge company like Infosys is to recruit, enable, empower and retain the best and the brightest talent. We realized long ago that we had to make a compelling value proposition to our employees, much the same as we did for our customers," Murthy once told students at Wharton.
Adopting the motto, "Learn once, use anywhere", Infosys developed a highly scalable education and training infrastructure. All new entrants enter a fourteen week educational program, which not only socializes them into the Infosys culture and value system, but also provides them with relevant technical and managerial skills.
The comprehensive go/no-go training program was benchmarked by leading academics in the US against US standards. A four year engineering degree in any branch of engineering in India combined with Infosys' fourteen week programs in competency enabling is considered to be equal to a four years bachelor of science in computer science in any university in the US; and the Infosys certification meets the
INS and the BCIS stringent standards for visa applications.
Formal education, however, does not end with this rigorous initial training. Each
Infoscion has to undergo fifteen days of formal training to upgrade their technical and managerial skills every year. The courses are run under the aegis of the
Knowledge Management Group.
The number of employees has grown sharply. From 250 employees in 1992, to 1,172 employees in 1996, 3,766 in FY99, and 25,000 in FY03, the headcount stood at
58,000 in December 2006. To cope with its ballooning training needs, in 2005,
Infosys opened the doors of its Global Education Centre at Mysore which

concurrently trains 4,000 entry level employees. By centralizing training in a world class residential facility, it is able to attract high quality faculty. Interestingly, the training centre allows Infosys to speed or delay the decision of where, and in which location to deploy the new recruits, thereby building a just-in-time model in services.
Moreover, learnings on training have been internalized. In 2000, the lead time to get fresh engineers up and running in Infosys was between twelve to fifteen months.
Today it takes about 45 days for a batch of 1,000 raw recruits who could as well be from drawn from bschools, commerce, or the science streams as engineering. a sustainable business model
Learnability is both "stock and flow" at Infosys. Besides recruiting people on the learnability characteristic, Infosys tries to ensure that every instance of learning within the company is made available to every Infoscion and nuggets of knowledge are used and reused. The Knowledge Management Group has established a number of mechanisms to ensure this.
automating recruitment: of the 1mn people who apply for a job, all are screened,
10.5% are tested but only 1% receives offers. Infosys today has the capacity to test
10,000 people in seven cities on the same day. Infosys was one of the earliest to automate the recruitment process, something which several IT companies have enthusiastically adopted.
Despite the fact that the number of people applying for a job at Infosys outnumbers the number of openings, Infosys aggressively markets itself to the 2.1mn graduates from science, commerce and liberal arts, besides the engineers from the IIT and regional colleges. Recruitment planning begins twenty months ahead of the hiring process. There are campus interviews, as well as inviting applications over the
Internet, newspaper ads, through job fairs, and HR consultants. The initial screening is based on such criteria as academics and experience.
The shortlisted applicants undergo a selection test. The test comprises two main components: arithmetic reasoning and logical reasoning. Because of time pressures involved in testing the large volume of candidates across the country, the reading comprehension section has been eliminated, cutting down the testing time to one hour.
Tutorials or coaching classes offered by third parties are popular among individuals who wish to prepare for these competitive tests. Infosys has a question bank system from which questions are picked randomly for each test centre. Those who score above the cut-off in the selection test are called for an interview. Interviews are conducted jointly by the human resource managers and the technical manager.
At the interview stage screening criteria used are aspirations, expectations, flexibility, presentation skills and communication skills. Rejected candidates may reapply after nine months. People do come back and, if they have picked up the necessary skills, they are hired.
The software is not limited to the weeding out the losers. It handles the entire workflow of interview process from calendar scheduling, capturing feedback online, offer approvals, offer generation, to documentation for joining. The software is integrated with the main employee database, which means that it becomes easier to switch the information from the resume stage to the employee stage, and it also allows HR managers to view the bigger picture, where employees are most needed in

the company, for example. It can generate analytical reports linking test scores with on-the-job performance, which enables the company to improve the hiring process the next time round.
knowledge creation: the origins of Infosys's efforts to create knowledge for the future can be traced to company efforts starting around 1992 to create Bodies Of
Knowledge (BOK), which are nuggets of experiential knowledge on topics ranging from technologies and application software to adapting to new cultures. Used frequently, they lacked visibility as well as extensive use across the organization till the development and deployment of a formal, enterprise wide KM system during
1999-2000.
Besides creating and recording internal knowledge, white papers, and reusable code, the KM system affords Infoscions access to external content like websites and technology and business news. Eighteen different content types of contents have been identified (BOK being one of them). Every item in the content repository is associated with one or more nodes (representing areas of discourse) in a 'knowledge hierarchy' and tagged to facilitate ease of submission, classification and retrieval.
Currently, approximately a fifth of all Infoscions have contributed at least one knowledge artifact to the central KM repository, and more than a thousand knowledge artifacts are downloaded daily for serious use by users across the Infosys intranet.
what to teach: a bulk of the technical education is carried out by a 50-person strong
Education and Research Center (E&R). The E&R faculty includes senior Infoscions and experienced professionals from outside the company. In addition to training
Infoscions, the E&R center also performs research on new technologies and pilots them as they emerge. As such, E&R is at the cutting edge of practice and can anticipate the educational needs of Infosys's employees.
milestone program: learnability is also a key factor in career progression, which can move at rapid clip in Infosys. By 26, an Infoscion can become a 'manager of managers'. By 28, s/he could well be a general manager, and by mid-30s, a director of the company. Those rewarded are those who have been able to jump from one paradigm to the next.
To help employees cope with the pressures of rapid career progression, Infosys initiated a Milestone Program. At each level along the career ladder, Infosys employees are coached by managers at higher levels about the demands and expectations of their new positions and the evaluation criteria that will be used to judge their future progress.
For instance, in the 'Managers of Managers' segment of the Milestone program, top managers caution new middle managers that their emphasis should no longer be on getting the technological minutiae right, but on coaching the team to achieve its objectives. Top managers coach these newly minted managers on the need for spending ample time on networking, interdepartmental socializing and meetings, fire-fighting and logistics administration.
At the next higher level, representing the shift from manager to company leader, a leadership program coaches potential candidates on the mindset shift required of leaders: a balanced focus on internal and external drivers, and an appreciation of how Infosys as an organization should evolve to succeed in the changing business landscape.

world class
As one walks through the company's campus in Bangalore, it is clear that intellectual capital is continuously being upgraded. After fourteen years of experience in training, once again Infosys is about to step on a learning curve: how to recruit and train people from outside India. Its workforce is becoming increasingly multicultural with employees drawn from 33 nationalities. The challenge will be in integrating them through its unique performance ethic.
Nonetheless the top management team at Infosys never forgets the Murthy axiom that, its "Core corporate assets walk out every evening, mentally and physically tired. It is our duty to make sure that these assets return well rested, energetic and enthusiastic the next morning. Our respect for our professionals can be summed by our belief that the market capitalization of Infosys becomes zero after working hours end at 5:00pm, no matter what it was during the day."