Comviva aims to halve bench-time for new recruits with campus training programme; To hire 550 people

An industry-level technology curriculum has been introduced by the IT business Comviva in collaboration with academic institutions in Odisha, which will assist the company cut the bench-time for new hires in half, according to a top company executive.

The company plans to hire 550 IT professionals during the current fiscal that will take its total headcount to around 2,400 people, Comviva CEO Manoranjan Mohapatra told.

The company has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoUs) with leading technology universities in Bhubaneswar - Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) and Institute of Technical Education & Research (ITER), SOA University for 'Comviva Campus Connect' programme that aims at building academia-industry partnerships for transforming the education system.

The programme will provide an industry-oriented experience by allowing students to work on practical and capstone projects aligned closely to industry requirements along with the senior technology leaders and learn from their professional experience.

"It takes five to six months to make a campus fresher productive. If it (the programme) is fully implemented, it will knock down about maybe half of the training time. At least three months still will be required," Mohapatra said.

The industry refers to bench time as a time period from the date of hiring a new employee to the day when he is engaged with a billable project.

As a part of this strategic partnership, Comviva will provide content, technologies, faculty training and access to industry experts in its core areas of focus like digital payments, real-time marketing and analytics, AI and data science and digital solutions.

Mohapatra said that though academia is making efforts to make a lot of modifications to their course huge gap still exists between academics and industry as the gap is becoming wider with the fast pace of development in the technology space.

He said that the programme is expected to start in the June -July semester of the partner academic institutions.

"We will also be offering some SME subject partner experts who would come in either physically or remotely and impart expert lecture series in some of these technology areas. That will start in January.

"We will also explore the possibility of giving some of our products and software licenses in their labs, installing them and doing some training for the faculties. The idea here is that institutes offer it as projects to their students which has more relevance to the industry today than very bookish theoretical kinds of projects," Mohapatra said.

He said that the company is also in advanced discussion for implementing the program at IIIT, Bhubaneswar.