As Reliance gets closer to the deadline for the roll out of its first retail outlet, the action is also hotting up on the people front.
According to HR consultants, the attrition levels in the sector have sky rocketed in the last few months, especially in the corporate and back office functions where Reliance has been steadily hiring.
The company's retail team is already 2,000 people strong. Over the next few years,
the group has committed to spending Rs 25,000 crore on its retail rollout , which is expected to create at least 1 million jobs both directly and indirectly. And this is just retail.
Refining, the company's other major initiative, is also likely to spawn a number of openings, predominantly for engineers and management staff.
Ambani said that in addition to the 10,000 professionals that they would be hiring for the retail venture, the company would also take on board 500,000 customer care executives.
These would be youngsters, either students or those who are fresh out of college, who would be trained by the company across a variety of disciplines.
These would include behavioural traits, customer service, product knowledge and the technology aspects, all of which would serve them well as the frontline staff for the retail stores.
"Our plan is to provide training and education opportunities on a distributed learning platform through classroom e-learning and and personalised coaching in a 'earn while you learn' framework," said Ambani.
The company is said to be working in collaboration with a foreign partner to develop an appropriate training module for the frontline staff.
In addition to this, Mukesh Ambani is said to be finalising plans to set up a university in Gujarat which would produce 10,000 graduates a year.
While the university would offer courses across various disciplines, it is believed that most of these students would be absorbed by the different Reliance group firms. The university is also likely to tie up with a few international universities.
Vijay Govindarajan, argues that Indians are innovative; even villagers are used to doing more with less. But Indian companies lack the will to innovate.
Indian companies are prone to imitate practices from their western counterparts. Says Arun Maira, chairman, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), India and member, Innovation for India-Marico Foundation: “These may not be the right practices for our context, so we may not get the result.”
R.A. Mashelkar, director general, CSIR has long argued, society is reasonably ambivalent to the need for innovation in India. In an interview to BW in 2002 (see ‘Think Differently!’, 4 February 2002) he had said: “What we need is to get the entire society on board — administrators, educationists, ordinary people. We need to launch a national innovation movement.”
Nirmalya Kumar, professor of marketing at the London Business School, says “One must remember that while manufacturing is often in low-cost countries, innovation is kept closer to home by developed countries as it is considered their competitive advantage,” he says. In other words, if India has ambitions of becoming an economic superpower, it needs to match, if not beat the developed nations at the innovation game.
Madhukar Shukla, professor at XLRI, says not much is being done to address this segment of the market: “There is a vast market at the bottom of the pyramid. It also makes business sense.” One derivative of the bottom-of-the-pyramid mindset is the emphasis most Indian companies have begun paying to thrift. And that, in turn, have made many of them globally competitive, especially in manufacturing. XLRI’s Shukla, argues that even if India were to create an iPod, lack of marketing muscle would not allow it to exploit the global market. “The XP launch cost Microsoft close to $800 million. Can any Indian company match that?” he says.
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You'll find entry level jobs at College Recruiter.
With the constant pressures of career planning, socializing is hard work for B-school students. "Among students, socializing and networking is basically the same thing," says 2006 University of Virginia Darden graduate Trevor Brown. Even tailgate parties at weekend football games are sponsored by major recruiters. Business and pleasure also get blurred when companies sponsor social events off-campus, such as bowling parties or fancy dinners. It's in this non-academic atmosphere that jobs are often secured, according to Darden student Caroline Rosenberg.
