Virtusa drove a mentoring program where thirteen leaders came forward to mentor the winners of Jatayu, one of our flagship hackathons. Let’s find out what some of our leaders have to say about their take on mentorship.
Today, the business world has created a more people-oriented realm by redefining employee centricity. Leveraging the power of ideation and innovation remains the timeless currency for nurturing skill-based development programs. That’s why Virtusa forays into its vision of putting employees at the forefront of the company’s growth trajectory. And a critical pillar to achieving this goal is mentorship.
With a common goal of building a sustainable, future-proof base of knowledge workforce, the whole nine yards of service lines have put mentorship in the spotlight. One of the conscious practices that Virtusa implements towards this vision is rooting home managers as forerunners to create a significant sigma impact at the company level regarding skill update and progression.
As a part of establishing a functional network of home managers within Virtusa, we are attaching goals and, therefore, incentives to incorporate them into the overall performance and promotion metrics. As a mentor, carrying skill progression will be a primary role of a home manager by helping young members coach through their career progression.
Amplifying growth opportunities for young minds with programs like Jatayu:
Jatayu is Virtusa’s exclusively curated program run with partner center of excellence (CoE) colleges and students in their pre-final year with the primary purpose of building an open innovation platform. Jatayu focuses on creating market-ready solutions for industry-related problems using the latest technology and segueing into a new growth market. Through Jatayu’s success stories, Virtusa drove a mentoring program where thirteen leaders came forward to mentor the winners. From soft skills to all things technology, we offered these winners the next-best learning opportunities. So, they get applied or redeployed into high-value proposition positions. Making them part of the system early by mentoring and intentionally moving them on multiple different assignments is a way to enhance their overall capabilities.
Why is mentoring young mind essential to actualize the envisioned future of skill-driven employment?
Every mentor has been a mentee once in their life. As my mentors accelerated my career by bringing me on the right trajectory, similarly, I have to be a change maker for someone else. When I was working as a technical delivery manager in a middle management role, I used to collect a lot of data for senior managers. Catching up with those seniors by the end of every day, I would see how they would morph unqualified raw data into executive-facing client messages. I knew I needed to learn to do the same. So, I had an on-the-job mentorship. It took my willingness to take the first step toward my seniors with an inquisitive mind. And what followed was my mentor to see the fire in me.
Developing such acumen in both the mentor and the mentee goes a long way. Let’s find out what some of our leaders who were a part of Jatayu have to say about their take on mentorship:
“Young minds have passion and willingness to change the world, and with the guidance of an experienced mentor, they can do so! Mentoring others is like helping and giving back to society. It’s also the responsibility of leaders who have already walked a long path to direct others to do even better with the help of their own experience. One becomes a leader only when one learns to lead, and there can be no better opportunity than mentoring.”
“Young minds graduating from educational institutes come with a lot of energy and exposure to various interest areas. Experienced leaders with wisdom through practice enable them to prioritize various developments and carve out a plan that helps the fresh talent align with high-priority areas. Apart from the learning, you also get a sense of purpose that you are working towards improving the career trajectory of young minds.”
“Young minds these days face a challenging world where a broader and deeper set of skills are crucial to success than ever before. It is essential to enable them to use their unbridled talents to contribute to the world and society. Future leaders must learn the art of building team relationships and display effective communication and interpersonal skills to think freely and make bold decisions.”
It’s time to redefine career progression by imparting next-best learning:
Today we are at war for talent, with a massive gap between available and expected talent. As a result, everyone is pivoting forward on how to fill this gap. Imparting a proper technical mentorship by navigating the teams towards the next-best learning within the company becomes more critical than ever. Skill-up driven by next-best learning suits an individual and is also essential for a company and enables one to stay relevant in the ever-changing industry.
For an IT services company, people are of utmost importance. And even among our people, the focus remains on their skills. Employers should emphasize skill quotient and focus their resources on nurturing and growing it to create a sigma-level impact across the company and industry. As a mentor, I urge you to call for action. Uplift the capabilities of a team member. Set a level playing field for a peer-to-peer level of knowledge-sharing practices, even across peer groups from different companies. See every team member as per his skill-set and capability, and ensure how you, as a home manager, will navigate him to achieve his next-best skill learning to retain, reward, and redeploy the right talent.
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Venkatesan Vijayaraghavan
Head of Technology Service Lines
Venkatesan has 25+ years of experience in technology and operations services and strong financial service background. His expertise spans primarily around scaling segments of businesses in technology services exponentially. He has vast experience managing global clients and has expertise in servicing clients across North America, Europe, and Asia, both in delivery and commercial roles. His ability to set up teams for strong collaboration across delivery and practice has produced outstanding results in growing business segments.