After mass layoffs, Narayana Murthy's Infosys now postpones...; set to affect 800 employees

Days after Infosys, India's second-largest IT services company, laid off over 300 freshers who underwent foundational training at its Mysuru campus but could not clear internal assessments, the company has now postponed internal assessments scheduled for another set of trainees by a week, PTI reported. There are reportedly 800 trainees who are slated to take their tests. The Narayana Murthy's company, however, asserted that the deferment is aimed at giving them additional time for preparation.

"It is in our interest to see how we can help these set of trainees to get through the training program, and that they come out successful at the end of the training so we can continue with them as employees in the company. We have seen the failure rate, and therefore we wanted to give them an additional opportunity and time to prepare," Shaji Mathew, Chief Human Resources Officer at Infosys, said.

The additional time will help them in the doubt-clearing, and subject matter experts will be made available so they can actually work with trainees to prepare them well. The trainees who faced layoffs were helped with outplacement service, and given one month of severance pay, Mathew said and emphasised that Infosys is doing all it can including making counselling services available for the trainees.

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Infosys, he said, has been recruiting freshers from college, training them and making them industry-ready, and this has been a big part of the company's strategy for decades. "We've been training a very large number of freshers over the last decade, several decades actually, in fact, our training centre in Mysore is probably one of the largest corporate training centres as well, so it is a big part of our strategy and training and enablement.

"It's also important that we get the right talent through this training program. So we've got a training curriculum and an assessment methodology which has evolved over the last several years, and we really make sure that we get the right set of people at the end of the training," he said.

Trainees, he said, are given three assessment chances to clear, and have to exit the organisation if they are unable to clear even after the third assessment. "This is a process that has existed for over two decades, now. Nothing really has changed," he said.

(With inputs from PTI)