The country’s second-largest IT services company, Infosys Technologies, is in negotiation with leading IT firms to jointly offer training courses in hope to produce more industry-ready graduates. Beginning with 1,000 colleges across the country, the company hopes to finalize such initiatives by December.

Presently, various IT companies are running training programs on their own. A program run by Infosys which is known as Campus Connect covers over 500 engineering colleges and apart from assistance for industry-oriented curriculum, it also includes faculty and student training.

Infosys VP and group HRD head Nandita Gurjar feels that this initiative would help in bringing together the biggest recruiters in the IT industry and thereby lead to more investments in up till now untapped colleges. She further added, “There needs to be a consensus on what we will do together and what separately.”

To produce more corporate-ready graduates, IT companies have been working with colleges and schools. The benefit of these programs would be that it will help to produce more efficient graduates in the long run, without much expenditure of time and money spent on training them. During the last financial year, Infosys for instance spent $ 170 million on training. Have these programs would have been available at that time, the company could have been able to save a lot.

Other than this, Infosys is planning to cover both engineering and non-engineering colleges under the joint program as it also runs a training program for non-engineering colleges for its BPO recruitments.

To add more, the 502 colleges which come under Infosys’ Campus Connect would also come under the joint initiative. Ms Gurjar reported that they would be able to invest more in the infrastructure of these colleges. As far as the hiring of employees is concerned, the company would hire 22,000-25,000 people this year, against 35,000 last year, and nearly 60% of these would be fresh graduates.