Cognizant has found a unique way to boost its digitally-savvy employees to equip themselves in the new world technologies like never before. In a pleasantly surprising move, reports are suggesting that the IT major rolled out a skills premium allowance this year which has been given to 40,000 employees excelling in the field of digital technologies.
It comes as an encouraging move for employees to build and improve their skills in technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, especially at a time when dependency on technology is increasing than ever before. With an increasing focus on data analytics and a keen interest in adopting new age technologies to streamline processes, companies find it challenging to find professionals equipped with required skills.
The move by Cognizant effortlessly addresses two most important challenges with the skills allowance—boost the employees to learn new unique skills and reduce the attrition rate.
Despite the reports suggesting that Cognizant offered one of the best average hikes this year, it has been dealing with high attrition rates over the last few years. Reports suggested that it had an attrition rate of 20.3% in the first quarter compared to previous years.
It would also motivate employees to upskilling themselves to bring better offerings for the company. For instance, a few years ago where developers specialising in SAP were given a hot skill bonus, the bonus amount would increase for learning advanced tools such as S/4 HANA implementation. As digital is becoming the new normal, companies are looking forward to build a rather strong digital talent pool. And this move by Cognizant might prove to be quite inspiring.
Our past report on salary of analytics professionals had suggested that upskilling through analytics related courses adds to the salaries over time. Some of the highly paid tools in the industry are R, Python, Hadoop, Spark. It also suggested that advanced analytics and predictive modelling professionals are paid the highest salaries compared to their analytics peers at 14.5 Lakhs on median.
