Wipro's five-point talent strategy is tightly linked to the company's strategic plan.

When Vishwas Santurkar assumed his role as vice president and head of talent transformation at Wipro 2.5 years ago, after 21 years with the company, he was given a mandate for change: to ensure that employees had the multiple skills required to serve customers around the globe in the face of rapidly advancing technology; to excel in the digital world, as contributors and learners; and to use advanced technology to reach and train Wipro's global workforce of more than 170,000. The talent transformation organization, which numbers more than 400, adeptly stepped up to the challenge.

Learning has long had a seat at the strategic table at Wipro, helping to set enterprise strategy in two essential ways: by training senior leaders about business strategy during annual sessions that precede strategic planning exercises; and by assessing concomitant talent needs during the formulation of enterprise strategies.

"Assessment of employees' technical and behavioral competencies for Wipro to achieve planned goals is a crucial input from the talent development function in the formulation of enterprise strategy," Santurkar says. "Further, we work closely with business unit leaders to identify critical talent needs and the role that they can play in helping business units succeed."

The company's talent strategy has five core elements:

• Hire the right talent.

• Foster a learning environment to nurture and enable employees to be best in class.

• Be fair, progressive, and consistent in talent management processes.

• Listen to employees and put feedback into action.

• Encourage diversity and inclusion.

  Informed by the strategic plan, the learning organization designs enterprise learning plans based on the talent strategy to deliver large-scale training programs. Learning solutions are directed at employees working on active customer engagements that require more than 4,500 skills across competency dimensions. These are supplemented by capability-building programs and dynamic, need-based learning initiatives.

  Although 68 percent of training is still delivered in the classroom by a live instructor, programs are increasingly focused on and delivered via the disruptive technologies—social, mobile, analytics, and cloud, often with gamification thrown in—that have come to encompass "digital." They comprise the company's most innovative learning initiative of the past year.

  "Our industry is undergoing a transformation in the type of business we are doing and the technology required to do it. The kinds of skills our employees need are changing very fast," Santurkar explains. "We have a strong business pipeline, and need to get our employees trained quickly."

  The learning function has designed and developed unique programs, including Future Ready, an innovative platform for building awareness in digital technologies for all customer-facing roles. It delivers weekly training modules (webinars) on new technologies, company capabilities, and customer case studies.

  "Currently, many of our employees are working on projects that don't require digital skills," Santurkar notes. "We realized that in order for our employees to be digitally fit, they would need to learn those skills, then work on hands-on projects to facilitate their deployment."

  Top Gear is an open-source platform used for providing hands-on experience. It is integrated with the enterprise social media platform Yammer, which enables teams across different groups and geographies to collaborate and learn. Gamification techniques such as leaderboards encourage and reward key contributors. "The open-source aspect ensures easy integration of technologies and includes tools for customization. It is a very cohesive approach," Santurkar says.

  The Digital Academy was designed to create technologists who can build and deploy Internet-scale applications. Participation is selective and competitive, via a specially designed challenge to assess participants' analytical thinking, problem solving, and coding skills. The rigorous three-month program includes curriculums in programming languages, technology, engineering processes, and tools.

  "It is designed to foster entrepreneurship, design thinking, and high performance through its immersive simulation of a real start-up environment with a challenging problem and an aggressive timeline," says Santurkar. Business results have been impressive: The number of certified "digital-ready" employees at Wipro has increased by 100 percent.

  The learning organization facilitated the growth of that pipeline by equipping sales and customer-facing employees with new skills. "With a view to creating more sales opportunities, differentiating our offerings, and closing more deals by improving sales conversations, we initiated a unique selling skills course based on the science behind how the brain makes decisions," Santurkar explains. The course, "Power Messaging," uses a blended learning approach that includes an e-learning course, a two-day instructor-led program, and just-in-time post-training reinforcement over six months.

  View the entire list of 2016 BEST Award winners.