IT Major Cognizant starts to identify executives from its mid and top tiers for re-skilling and re-training, following plans to optimize the workforce to reduce costs and improve margins.
Karen McLoughlin, Chief Financial Officer said, “The Company is in the process of selecting mid- and senior-level resources among the planned 5,000 employees who will be reskilled.”
We are looking now to try and identify who are the first wave of folks that we will put through those re-skilling programs and then put them back into the market. All of this is targeted, and I would call sort of the more mid- to senior levels of the organization. So, we are really trying to address our pyramid, she added
Our company earlier this year embarked on a large-scale cost reduction program – with up to 12,000 job cuts, reorganization of its pyramid, reskilling and exiting some lines of business – that it said would help achieve between $500 million and $550 million in savings. It expects to achieve $400 million of these savings by next year, she further said.
Cognizant is planning to increase hiring in its sales vertical to build a 500-strong team that will target niche deals in digital services.
McLoughlin also said 60 of the planned 500 new executives had been on-boarded and hiring would continue into the next two quarters. The new employees would take between 9 and 12 months to turn into revenue-generating executives, she added. Depending on future performance and needs, the company would also determine if 300-500 more sales executives would be required.
