A week in Johannesburg interacting with the hundreds of young people who constitute Zensar?s Africa operations has been an eye opener to the opportunity that lies in front of the IT sector if we take our Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) agenda seriously. This has been one of the most successful operations scaling to 600 people on both shores in a few years and would not have been possible without a sharp eye on the need to include many young South Africans in the work force. The early steps towards establishing a Learnership program with a centre in Sandton near Johannesburg where batches of 15-20 local recruits would receive initial training and then get intensively trained in India was more of an experiment but today this has become, with some support from the local Government, an excellent initiative that effectively supplements our own staffing of projects in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. The proof of concept lies in the fact that over 85 young learners are now deployed at multiple client sites and their performance is second to none even in complex assignments with demanding clients.

The good news for most industry players who have set serious goals for Diversity and Inclusion beyond lip service or just as a matter of corporate social responsibility is that the industry trends today support serious initiatives in this area. The move towards managed services at the support end and consulting led solutions design at the higher end both enable local hiring and deployment and the political climate in most markets also point towards a move away from excessive deployment of overseas resources. However this does place an onus on better skill and culture dissemination to an increasingly global workforce, which is a challenge all of us can and should take up in the years to come as our industry moves from being just multinational to truly global.

The diversity quotient particularly in the recruitment and elevation of women in IT firms is also receiving proper attention across the industry. At Zensar, the software business which started in the year 2000 initially struggled to have even 20% women in our workforce and barring the Financial Controller no women at all in management. Through active efforts including a very successful ?Women for Excellence? initiative, we have seen the percentage of women recruited crossing 30% and young and ambitious women rising through the ranks to occupy positions of responsibility from the Company Secretary to the heads of Quality, Internal Audit, Major Account Management, Process Reengineering and Human Resources. With at least a hundred women managers waiting in the wings to elevate themselves to senior leadership roles and enabling policies like flexibility of working from home and extended leave periods at critical points in their family life, this is one area that has been addressed well over the past years.

At an industry level too, the extent of attention paid to workforce diversity has been laudable and with the possible exception of firms like ICICI, we are far ahead of the rest of the corporate sector in this regard. Specific NASSCOM and company conferences focused on women?s issues have been held over the years and many women role models from global IT from Karly Fiorinia of HP and Meg Whitman of eBay to Rebecca Jacoby and Padmasree Warrier of Cisco have been recognised and spoken at conferences in recent times. At a global level, cultural diversity has been attempted by most of the top IT firms with local development centres and training initiatives in various countries contributing to the successful transformation of the image of the outsourcing industry as job creators rather than just job loss catalysts. And India?s vibrant training industry has been proactive too with firms like NIIT, Aptech and Global Talent Track creating pools of deployable manpower in over sixty countries worldwide. Finally, back to Zensar?s South Africa model and the success of the learnership program has given us the confidence to start similar initiatives in Europe this year and hopefully Saudi Arabia and even the USA soon. With a stated objective to have 10% of our global workforce locally hired by 2016 and 30% of our associates and 20% of our managers women, the confidence exists that we can set new standards for Diversity & Inclusion for the industry! And this will make business sense too in a fast changing world.

Dr Ganesh Natarajan is Vice Chairman & MD of Zensar Technologies Ltd and co-chair of the National Knowledge Council of the CII