The Company
India's marquee business and information technology consulting company with over $2 billion in turnover and 50,000 employees spread across the world.

The Problem
Typically, technology experts and software engineers update core functional skills through various technical programs appropriate to their level of intent. The company's customers however sought the “consultant” variety to service their business needs rather than pure technical experts. The company therefore felt the need to train their resources and expose them to various functions of a business.

The company planned to develop a consulting mindset in its technical workforce. The company expected the transformation from mere software engineers to professional consultants as a key driver to move up the value chain in IT services and solutions.

The Solution
The solution was developed in multiple-stages:

1. The reasons for the disinterest amongst technical resources to learn anything but technology were identified.
2. To overcome this barrier, a basket of e-learning courses were designed appropriate to their background and experience. The courses were to entice technical resources to enhance their core skills.
3. The courses were sequenced in a way that steadily graduated the learners to advanced concepts.

The first course on the essentials of business triggered the entire learning momentum. Using a story-telling format of a startup company, the learners were encouraged to discover the “non-software” part of a business.

The “start-up” story generated a lot of interest among the learners as starting something new was found to be a universal aspiration. Once the learners got an idea about how a business is started, they were graduated to other management functions such as Human Resource Management and Marketing. To connect to some of the applications that the learners would have developed in their career, a case-study approach was deployed in parallel to the learning from the courses. Finally the learners were introduced to client relationship management , different consulting models and coached towards adopting a consulting mindset .

Development and Implementation
A total of six sets of courses were developed, each of four-five learning hours over a period of four months using C&K's rapid-deployment outsourcing model. Scope of work included design of the course, development of bespoke content and digitizing in an interactive format as per SCORM standards. These were hosted on the company's own Learning Management System.

Results
As of now, over 5000 technical experts spread over 25 countries have taken up the courses.

The average feedback has been that the courses are “particularly useful” as against being “merely interesting”. The company is moving up the value delivery chain from a ‘technology only' company to a professional services consulting one. Additional courses are now being evaluated to further move up the value chain.