TCS to set up Rs 1,000-crore mega campus in Kerala

India's largest IT services provider, Tata Consultancy Services, is investing Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) to set up a training campus in Kerala housing 10,000 professionals.

Construction will commence in 2011-12 and be completed in three years. TCS is the second IT firm to set up such a facility after Bengaluru-based Infosys Technologies inaugurated its campus in Mysore last year.

The TCS campus, set in 82 acres in Thiruvananthanpuram, will have classrooms, auditoria, computer laboratories, a library, cafeterias, accommodation facilities as well as recreational and shopping areas. The firm has had a 2,000-seat primary training centre in the city since 1997.

"The 10,000-seat campus will set a global benchmark for corporate learning institutions in terms of physical infrastructure, as well as professional and personal development programmes," said N Chandrasekaran, chief executive officer and managing director, TCS.

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TCS currently trains all its campus hires at its seven satellite training centres, in Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Chennai, Montevideo (Uruguay), Cincinnati (US) and China. The company spends around 2 per cent of its annual revenues on training.

The headcount at TCS touched 160,429 at the end of FY10. Of this, it hired 8,429 trainees (campus hires). For FY11, the firm plans to hire around 40,000 employees (an increase of 10,000 over its earlier projection).

According to the firm's June 30 announcement, 14,425 offers were made in Q4 FY10, taking its total offers to 20,050.

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India's second-largest IT services firm, Infosys, plans to train close to 8,000 freshers for FY11. Its training centre in Mysore can handle 14,000 employees at any given time.

Spread over 337 acres, Infosys spent over Rs 2,000 crore (Rs 20 billion) to set up the centre, of which Rs 1,700 crore (Rs 17 billion) was on education- and training-related infrastructure.

For Indian IT services, training is a crucial element as they hire graduates and engineers fresh out of college in large numbers.

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The industry has invested heavily in manpower development, with an average training period of three to four months for fresh recruits (involving a spend of up to 40 per cent of a fresh recruit's salary) and additional training over the entire employee lifecycle.

Almost 62 per cent of all engineering graduates require education or training to be eligible for any job in the IT and IT-enabled services sector, said a study by Aspiring Minds -- an assessment technology provider.

The study further noted that IT product firms feel that only 4.22 per cent of graduates are fit for employment. Similarly, IT services companies said just 17.84 per cent are employable.

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The total time spent on training constitutes over 5 per cent of employee man hours in a year, said the Nasscom Leadership Review 2010. The average training spent on a new recruit costs over $3,300 (around Rs 1.5 lakh), said the review.

A Nasscom-Evalueserve analysis shows that, on average, IT-ITeS companies spend $1.2 billion on training. About 40 per cent is spent on new employees.

Analysis also indicates that training spends per employee are among the highest in the organised service sector. For example, the top five Tier-1 vendors spent nearly $450 million (around Rs 2,080 crore) to train around 130,000 engineers hired in 2008-09.