Genpact Training Academy—Changing Lives
By Bindu Chadha

Genpact’s 28,000 highly-skilled associates offer unrelenting focus on process excellence to deliver maximum business impact. They speak 28 languages, and deliver services from 24 state-of-the-art operations centers across the world.

Of these employees, over 19,000 work in India and over 8,000 are required to be proficient in English, although it may be a second language for them. 

Such a vast offering mandates a comprehensive training program to ensure the highest quality of service delivery. Fulfilling this need is the Genpact Training Academy, which offers world-class training programs, built on GE’s training model. With two million training hours invested annually, Genpact employees get the best training and learning opportunities in the industry.

Business Case:
Currently, the conversation rate from resume-to-employee is at 4 percent, which indicates that Genpact sources a whopping 200,000 resumes to recruit just 8,000 associates. Compounding this challenge is the ongoing ‘war for talent’ among Indian BPO organizations.

To tackle this, Genpact decided to switch tracks and take its talent search to tier-II and tier-III cities of India, only to realize that proficiency in spoken and written English was an even rarer skill there.

And so the concept of ‘Pre-Hire Training’ was born. Initially termed the ‘Voice Trainee Program’ (VT), it later blossomed into the Genpact Training Academy. The objective was to help train pre-hires at a lower voice level to reach the required level of capability.

Current mode of Operation:
Diverse training models ensure that pre-hires are trained according to their input voice level. The duration varies from about 4 weeks to 9 weeks with the end objective of upgrading their skills them to the required voice level for deployment into voice processes across Genpact.

The training model is highly scalable, with the number of trainers, trainees and training days being flexible, depending on the requirement. The e-learning component of the package is used as a tool to refresh what is taught during the instructor-led sessions and call takers who wish to enhance their grammar and pronunciation can do so at their own pace.

Though the demands of the Industry have evolved over the years, the focus of the program has remained rock-solid—constant research and innovation in training methodology to target different voice levels as well as sharing social responsibility towards the community.

Business Impact:
The Pre-Hire Training case study was recently awarded with the Brandon Hall Gold Award, out of 38 entries. Brandon Hall’s ‘Excellence in Learning’ awards are the most prestigious in the training industry, aimed to showcase and recognize the best and most innovative learning practice.

The case study is being referred to as a unique initiative and has attracted much attention at the American Society of Training & Development—a leading association of workplace learning and performance professionals. 

A testimony to its success is the fact that the program contributed a whopping 53 percent of Genpact’s overall hires in 2006. From three centers, it has successfully spread to over 24 cities across India and has trained 6,000 candidates and provided employment to 4,000. The program comes with the added benefits of low cost and lower attrition.

This training program has now evolved into a thriving platform to hire call-takers and has become a predictable pipeline.

Vision:
Now that the pre-hire training program has established its place in the industry, it is time to raise the bar and continue delivering excellence. It must aim to meet the demand of training at least 12,000 candidates a year, using cost-effective models while increasing efficiency, without impacting quality. The idea is to transcend to other critical domains such as Finance, Insurance and Technology by strategizing the training models and reaching out to the variable requirement of the businesses.

There are plans to expand the pre-hire pool to prepare a long-term supply chain and short-term strategies by reaching out and tapping talent at different levels and locations, using various models, including campus initiatives.

The aim is to increase trainer utilization through effective training methodologies and take it to newer heights by training on process-specific skills as well as business communicative skills.

The Genpact Training Academy is constantly reinventing itself with cutting-edge tools and technologies. For instance, Genpact has recently acquired a tool called the Genpact Language Advantage Decider (GLAD), to help the company evaluate candidates from tier-II and tier-III cities more effectively.

With a progressive outlook, the Genpact Training Academy hopes to continue being a pioneer and delivering excellence in the area of training and development.

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Bindu Chadha is the Assistant Vice President in charge of the Genpact Training Academy, and serves as the company's Product and Strategic Head. Ms. Chadha is responsible for positioning the Academy and creating pre-hire training models to create employment opportunities at Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities across India. As the Strategic Program Lead for the Genpact Training Academy's Pre-Hire Training, she aims at building a steady supply chain of resources of diverse profiles for diverse Genpact businesses.