The Company
India’s marquee IT services and business consulting company with a turnover in excess of US
$ 2 billion with over 50,000 employees worldwide.

The Problem
Software engineers typically show strong IT skills and update themselves regularly on these. The company’s customers however sought for the “consultant” variety to service their needs and not just software engineers. The company therefore wanted to train their engineers and expose them to various functions of a business, besides developing a consulting mindset in them. The company saw this transformation as a strategic driver to move up the value chain in IT services and solutions.

The Solution
The solution was evolved in multiple-stages. First, the reasons were identified for the disinterest amongst software engineers to learn anything but software. Second, to overcome this barrier, a basket of e-Learning courses were designed that would make sense to them. Third, these were sequenced in a way that steadily graduated them to more and more evolved concepts.

The entire learning package was triggered by the first course that taught them the basics of business. Using a story-telling format of a startup company, the learners were encouraged to discover the “non-software” part of a business. The “start-up” story triggered interest by itself since this was found to be an universal aspiration. Once hooked, they were graduated to other functions such as Human Resource Management and Marketing. A case-study approach was deployed in parallel to the learning, to connect to some of the applications that they would have developed in their career. Finally they were introduced to client relationship management, different consulting models and coached towards adopting a consulting mindset.

Development and Implementation
A total of 5 sets of courses were developed, each of 4 learning hours over a period of four months by our rapid-deployment outsourcing model. Scope of work included design of the course, development of bespoke content and
digitising in an interactive format as per SCORM standards. These were hosted on the company’s own Learning Management System.

Results
As of now, over 5000 software engineers across the globe have been through the course. The average feedback has been that the courses are “useful” as against being “merely interesting”. A slow but steady mindset change amongst the software engineers of the company, is in progress.