"With Falling Attrition, We Recalibrated Our Hiring Efforts," K. Krithivasan, CEO, TCS
K. Krithivasan, CEO, TCS in today's AGM speech commenced by saying, I am humbled by the opportunity to lead this remarkable organisation that I have been part of for 34 years, and be here in front you today."
He also stated that, "we exited the year with an order book of $10 billion, the strongest in the four quarters, despite the banking crisis in the US and the resultant uncertainty."
On the people front, we ended the year with a workforce that is 614,795 strong. With falling attrition, we recalibrated our hiring efforts, focusing more on utilising the excess capacity built up in the prior year. Net addition during the year was 22,600.
Talking about employee strength, Krithivasan comments that workforce continues to be very diverse, with women making up 35.7 per cent of the base, and with 150 nationalities represented.
Globally Distributed, Highly Localised Workforce
The management is known to have closed the year with a headcount of 614,795, which is a net addition of 22,600 over the prior year. The industry-wide spike in employee churn started selling down in FY 2023 after they expanded the talent pool by bringing on board an unprecedented number of fresh engineers over the last two years.
Attrition in IT services on an LTM basis is all high at 20.1 per cent, but as they exited the fiscal year, the quarterly annualised figure has fallen significantly from the peak figure in September. Over the years, they have been steadily localising their workforce, bringing on board local talent in each of our major markets. "Our workforce today is a highly diverse one, with 150 nationalities represented and with over 220,000 women," states Krithivasan in the AGM meeting.
Importantly, TCS's focused leadership development programs are helping increase the number of women in senior management. Over the last 5 years, that number has grown 60 per cent. Women make up a significant proportion of other innovators as well as Contextual Masters communities.
Best in Class Talent Development
Investment in organic talent development has been at the core of how we successfully navigated technology change and participated fully in the opportunities opened up by new technologies. They have fostered a culture of life-long learning, and linked learning to career growth. That is how they have been able to achieve these big numbers. TCSers are proactively investing in deepening their expertise and picking up new competencies, qualifying them to better assignments and faster career growth. Cumultively, they logged 48.3 million learning hours in FY 2023, and acquired 6 million competencies. 500,000 TCSers have been trained on digital technology and over 110,000 of them are certified on hyperscaler cloud technologies, making us the Top 1 or 2 partners to the Top 3 cloud providers.
"We have also been investing in the mid-level cohort, to help them gain new market-relevant skills and accelerate their career growth. We have made very good progress with 90 per cent participation rate from that cohort and with 60 per cent of them being certified on new technologies."
A big driver of employee interest in upskilling and cross-skilling has been the TCS Elevate program which links learning to career growth. Over 400,000 employees have participated in this program and 22,000 TCSers have been identified as high talent, qualifying for higher pay. These industry-leading outcomes have made our talent development program a benchmark and the recipient of many global awards, a few of which are listed on the slide.
