As per the reports, India’s largest software exporters, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys are exploring options to open up their internal e-learning courses directly to consumers said top company executives, marking a first for the IT services companies as they look to build new streams of revenue.
How Did This Happen?
India’s largest IT companies Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) are exploring new ways to take their e-learning courses to those outside the company.
So far, both companies use their skilling platforms – Infosys’ Lex and TCS’ Ion — to train over 700,000 employees, as they look to reskill their workforce.
The CEO of Infosys, Salil Parekh said “If you take the Wingspan-Lex story, there is a very small amount of work to be done to make it a consumer platform…We are not blind to it,”.
“Our main focus is still the large enterprises, but we are looking at some of these things which might morph into it over time,” he added.
What Is The Plan?
Moreover, the company’s mobile-based skilling platform – which measures the time spent by an individual in learning a new software program, identifies gaps and prods further learning — has been rebranded as Wingspan to sell it to its existing enterprise customers.
Basically, the plan is to now explore options beyond to create a consumer-facing business, top executives said.
The IT major Tata Consultancy Services has over 446,000 employees, is also looking to make its learning platform available to consumers at large.
It opened up the platform to students who had failed to make the cut on the national qualifier tests that it conducts while hiring freshers in 2019.
What Does TCS Say?
The chief operating officer, Tata Consultancy Services, Ganapathy Subramaniam said “The opportunity is there to… open it up to others, beyond the talent pool and the supply chain that we have,”.
You can say that skilling is a particularly hot topic in India. According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), a tenth of the users on skilling platforms globally are from India.
The demands for skills has sky-rocketed, as technology becomes an increasingly key part of all industries.
It is expected that the reskilling and certification market in India would grow to $500 million by 2021, according to a 2017 report by Google and KPMG.
Also, it accounts for a quarter of the $2.1 billion online education market.
According to the experts, IT services companies will likely require a different group (of executives) to run a consumer-facing business.
The founder of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research, Ray Wang said “They would need a separate subsidiary in order to focus on consumer needs or license out a joint venture,”.
Now Infosys has a team working on a consumer strategy for Wingspan-Lex and a commercial model.
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