Name: Infosys' Solution for the Tech Jobs Gap: 'Hire for Skills, Not Degrees'
Uploaded: 2021-08-20
Duration: 5 min 5 s
Description: President Ravi Kumar looks for 'curiosity' and an 'aptitude to learn.'

President Ravi Kumar looks for "curiosity" and an "aptitude to learn."

Infosys' Solution for the Tech Jobs Gap: "Hire for Skills, Not Degrees"

Leadership

Infosys on Tech Jobs Gap: "Hire for Skills, Not Degrees"

Robbie, thank you so much for joining us to talk about your company emphasis. And first of all, congratulations on celebrating the 40 year anniversary, since you started emphasis as a tech services company in India and now today you have operations all around the world. Tell us what is the main mission of exist today. Thank you, Susie for that question. Emphasis was established 40 plus years ago as Iraqi said. And we've, we've been on this mission to help large enterprises on the transformational journeys. And in recent times, the times we're all living in emphasis is a digital tax services company helping on digital transformation journeys for enterprises across the world. We have to 50,000 plus employees and we strongly believe in lifelong learning infrastructure For enabling the journeys. Well, you know, recently you made a pledge in 2020 to hire 25,000 people in the us by the year 2022. And I understand that you're already halfway there, but it's interesting that many of those hires uh, do not have college degrees and if they do it's from a community college and you wrote in an op ed piece urging tech companies to quote higher for skills, not degrees. What do you mean by that? And why is this approach so important right now, unlike other tech companies, we always hired from schools with undergrad degrees. And over the last few years, we started to realize that skills have a very short shelf life and especially digital skills have a short self life. And when you have a short self life, you could hire for skills and you don't need to grease at all. So we started this endeavor to go to community colleges where we found the jewel of talent. In fact, that 25-30% of students in the United States go to community colleges, that experiment really succeeded for us. And as it succeeded, we've stepped up on it and we have started to hire without an associate degree people who are working in other professions, low wage workers with high potential. How do we move them to high potential jobs and create the most complex? So it's a very interesting way of looking at the capabilities of the future, especially at a time when you've seen the july the board of jobs, Around 10.7 million open positions are there. And since 2000, since the year 2000, we've never had 10.7 million open positions and only 8.1 million people are available for this job. So there is a huge shortage of talent and you can create the feeder from skills and not necessarily degrees. That's a very interesting approach. How is it worth without hiring people for the potential that they have to learn these skills rather than for a four year college education. It's working very well. In fact, I would believe that if you can actually happen to learn ability of people and higher for potential, you could hire for skills, especially in a either where lifelong learning is very important, Where you could where you could potentially learn unlearn and relearn on a continuous basis all your life as skills can be the new paper for jobs. Well how do you find these people and given that you're not looking for people with a traditional background, what would you say is the most important question that you asked when you're interviewing someone for a job? So Susie, we look for curiosity, we look for attitude, we look for attitude for learning and learning and relearning. What would you say is the most important question you asked that you can find out if they have that curiosity and what do you want to hear from that candidate that you give them the job. You know in the past I would say Susie we obvious used to look for solving problems. We now look for finding problems. If the endeavor for humans is gonna be your finding problems and machines and Ai software is going to take away and solving problems, we look for people who have the curiosity to look for new problems which will which will be purposeful for the future. Well you're certainly providing a very valuable service and I'm sure uh you hear from so many Ceos who talk about the struggle that they're having to hire skilled workers besides what you're doing for them. What is the best advice that you give business leaders on how they can solve their job skills gap, the single most important thing is to be a learning organization. If CEOS can focus on making making their organizations and learning organizations so that they create lifelong learning templates. And if they can partner with governments and Academy of that will be the best thing possible for re skilling and for building jobs in the future. If we can get the news killing right, I think we will actually create much more prosperity for work.