Udaan Programme

Objective

To provide educated youth in India’s Jammu and Kashmir with skills training to give corporate India with exposure to the rich talent pool available in the state.

Overview and Main Activities

This programme provides skills and employment in high-growth sectors to approximately 5,000 youth from Jammu and Kashmir over a five-year period. Accenture selects students, provides training and places them either within Accenture or in another organization, or enables them to become entrepreneurs.

The programme is part of the government’s Udaan initiative, which addresses socio-economic development by helping young people acquire the necessary skills to work in the corporate world, particularly the business process outsourcing industry. Other partners include the NSDC.

To deliver the programme, Accenture provides management consulting services to create training that blends traditional, classroom-based instruction with on-the-job training. Accenture also collaborates with external agencies to leverage expertise and presence in the state. The overall scope of work for this project includes mobilization, training, placement, infrastructure and logistics.

Accenture supports the programme in the following ways:

• Institutional and community-based ‘drives’ conducted each month, such as promotional marketing initiatives using radio, TV, print newspaper and social media
• Orientation for candidates and parents about training benefits, career growth and personal safety
• Candidate pre-screening and selection
• Mobilization of selected candidates from Jammu and Kashmir to training locations in Bangalore and the National Capital Region
• Curriculum review and creation that focuses on hands-on practice sessions and includes for example soft skills and communications skills, campus-to-corporate orientation, customer service, sales process and negotiation, and MS Office and SAP
• Collaboration with external vendors to impart training
• Interview practice and feedback to help trainees improve and make them “job ready”
• Provision of various placement opportunities within Accenture and/or other organizations for candidates who complete the training
• Tracking of candidates for three to six months after completion of training

Success Factors and Challenges

Most critical success factors:

• Adopting a precise and rigorous candidate selection process
• Formulating a methodical plan that included requirement gathering from state universities, government officials, local skilling agencies, and other stakeholders; and a comprehensive mobilization and awareness drive that included partnerships with parent and student orientation and counselling sessions

Main challenges:

• Limited exposure available to the youth of the state
• Moving the talent pool out of the valley and exposing them to available lucrative commercial opportunities
• Under-utilized talent pool

Recommendations for Others

Conduct a requirements gathering exercise before starting with the mobilization process; the focus should be on mobilizing the youth and preparing them to enter the corporate world rather than recruitment. The team should adopt a scientific approach by first assessing the existing skill levels of the students and then building a customized training curriculum that blends traditional, classroom-based instruction with on-the-job training. The implementing team should also periodically introduce much-needed fun elements into the curriculum, such as team-building and bonding activities to make the programme interesting as well as outcome driven.

Replicability and Scalability

How easily could other organizations implement this initiative?
Easy

How easily can this initiative be expanded to include a larger number of participants?
Easy

About the Organization

Website: www.accenture.com
Sector: Professional Services
Size (number of employees): 100,000+
Headquarters: Dublin, Ireland

For Further Engagement

Contact name: Siddharth Sibal
Contact position: Programme Manager at Accenture
Email: Siddharth.sibal[email protected]