[Exclusive Interview] eClerx Upskilling 2500+ Employees in Robotic Process Automation

In an exclusive interview with Mr. Amir Bharwani, Head HR, eClerx Services Ltd., Trak.in finds out about the company’s initiatives in training its employees for the future and how L&D is an integral part of their strategy.

1.      Kindly introduce eClerx to our readers in your words.

eClerx Services Ltd is a business process management, automation and analytics services company. It has a number of Fortune 2000 clients, including some of the world’s leading financial services, communications, retail, fashion, media & entertainment, manufacturing, travel & leisure and technology companies.

Incorporated in 2000, eClerx is traded on both the Bombay and National Stock Exchanges of India since 2008, delivering revenue growth of almost 20% per annum since listing.

Even during the course of the pandemic, the company has grown consistently and hired in large numbers in all domains including financial markets, digital, analytics, technology and customer operations. The firm currently has a market capitalization of over $1 billion and employs over 13,500 people across Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, UK and the USA.

2.      Tell us about the new L&D initiative that you have rolled out recently.

In line with our people strategy to develop and invest in building niche skills, eClerx launched an enterprise-wide learning initiative titled ‘Skill of the Year’ in 2020.  In November 2020, the company partnered with the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing to certify 500+ employees with a program in ‘Data Visualization and Storytelling’, which was an overwhelming success.

This year, eClerx has picked RPA as the ‘Skill of the Year’ to enable its workforce to uncover opportunities ripe for automation, and to lead the development, implementation and running of RPA projects.

RPA continues to be one of the most sought-after skills in the IT and BPM space as enterprises increasingly adopt digital transformation, build intelligent operations via automation and implement process innovation. 

We continue to invest in and upskill our workforce on RPA and other emerging technologies, as we witness high demand and business growth in these areas. We have collaborated with the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, a top-notch research university that is at the forefront of modern academia, to upskill 2500+ of our employees in RPA. Armed with this certification program, our employees will be able to advance their learning, tap into internal career opportunities, and utilize this knowledge to deliver their best for our clients.

Our plan is also to sponsor another 100 top performing employees for advanced UI Path’s RPA certification and create a pool of ready-to-deploy RPA experts.

3.      A lot of our readers are IT professionals and engineering students. Can you please elaborate a little on how will Robotic Process Automation help in client delivery?

Clients look to us to unlock value from RPA in a whole host of scenarios, be it text mining, web scraping, applying machine learning models, reconciliation and more. 

With our expertise on leading RPA platforms like UI Path, Automation Anywhere, Workfusion, and our proprietary platform Roboworx, we enable clients along their digital transformation journey, and improve their business metrics and ROI.

4.      There is a worldwide chatter and fear amongst IT employees that RPA is going to replace human talent in IT/ITeS. Can you throw some light on this statement?

RPA technologies have been around for some time and contrary to popular perception, it has created a flood of new career opportunities. The growth and hiring you are witnessing in IT / ITES is testimony to this shift. We must recognize that we will inevitably automate some parts of almost every job that is predictable and repeatable, but this will provide us scope for more value-added transformative work. 

5.       What are the other L&D programmes that you have already completed recently?

As shared earlier, we are very committed to L&D programmes for our employees at eClerx. In this financial year, we have multiple programs that can be categorised in four areas largely. 

Technology – We have invested significantly in learning programs on cloud technologies – like AWS and Azure. We have also invested in building our data science center of excellence with learning programs in advanced statistics, predictive modelling using R, and Python. Domain – Our comprehensive suite of domain learning programs offer rich content covering the latest trends in retail, high-tech, investment banking, cable and telecom, and other specialized domains, to help our employees upskill and apply for career opportunities within the organisation. Managerial – Our in-house managerial development program named LEAP aims to enable our managers to effectively lead a hybrid workforce. The program has seen some early success in improved engagement and retention. Education – We have also announced a company-sponsored work integrated learning program that offers our employees an opportunity to pursue MBA and M. Tech from BITS Pilani, alongside their work roles.