Infosys expands internal promotions, stock option programmes to retain talent

The Indian IT industry has been doubling down on reskilling and retaining talent through various monetary and non-monetary compensations due to the alarming rates of attrition.

Infosys reported an
unprecedented attrition rate of 27.7% in the three-month period ended March 31.

“Most employees are leaving due to external market demand according to our analysis,” Krish Shankar, group head of human resource development at Infosys told ET. “It is also due to other personal reasons such as location preference and flexibility (in work) post-pandemic.”

Apart from
internal promotions and Esops, the Bengaluru-based company has also strengthened its “Bridge” programme in the last 12 months that helps a mid-career software engineer become a consultant, power programmer or digital specialist after training for three months once they clear an initial test for selection.

“The candidates move across streams and also get higher compensation after reskilling,” Shankar added.

Discover the stories of your interest

The huge upswing in the Covid-19 pandemic-led digitisation spend also spurred a massive demand for talent over the last few quarters.

While India’s largest software services firm by revenue,

() reported an attrition rate of 17.4%, for it was 21.9% and it was 23.8% for in the January-March quarter. Tech Mahindra’s number remained flat sequentially at 24%.

Shankar also downplayed concerns over delivery getting impacted due to deployment of freshers in projects.

“In digital transformation projects, the college freshers are much better at execution than an experienced employee who passed out five years back. They are also faster in terms of learning and skilling themselves with newer technologies,” he said.

India’s second largest software exporter by revenue has also awarded premium compensations for specific skills and aligned pay on par with market trends in areas such as cloud-related, big data analytics and specializations such as SAP, Salesforce capabilities – areas that faced high attrition.

The company is also opening offices in four tier-II locations – Coimbatore, Vizag, Kolkata and Noida – in a bid to be closer to the available talent pool and attract those employees who are leaving metro locations to stay closer to home, ET reported earlier this week.