Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) newly launched Talent Development programme, which links accelerated career performance with increased compensation. About 130,000 executives will sign up for this to elevate the program.

TCS, India’s largest IT services provider by income, launched the programme, Elevate, in April last year, in a bid to develop the next generation of leaders from it’s over 450,000 employees. Elevate has exact marks for employees with different experience levels and consistently improved pay packets.

Milind Lakkad, chief human resources officer of TCS, states, “The programme has helped the company further industrialise its talent development efforts, While we have always done talent development as per the customer needs in a short-term to medium-term manner, what we actually have focused more even more on in the last year is strategic talent development…This is another way of basically building the next generation of leaders for us within the organization.”

According to Milind, the programme is helping benchmark up skilling targets for freshers, mid-level professionals and veterans, where they are expected to transform themselves into full stack technology professionals, specialists and transformation leaders, respectively.

Milind added, “For 0-3 years experienced professionals are turning them into full stack professionals with all the next generation skills which they need to understand the business 4.0. When you go from 4 to 9 years of experience, we expect people to be specialists in IoT, analytics, security, in the pharma industry, in just program management and delivery or specialists in the sales path.”

Executives with experience of 10-13 years are expected to upskill themselves into growth and transformation leaders who are capable of directly taking on customers and C-Suites. The basic premise of the programme is to accelerate career performance and add to the pool of TCS ‘Ivy Leaguers’.

He added, “If people are performing extraordinarily well, we put them on a different career path, on a different compensation path altogether. There is a very strong connect that we created in the system where people are really excited take this path.”

The various levels are classified as wings one, wings two and wings three. For those employees who do not qualify for the programme and career progression, TCS helps in qualifying in succeeding attempts.