Infosys, Wipro lose their rank as the best IT employers

BANGALORE: Breaking the concept that Infosys and Wipro are the best employers in India is the Seventh Annual Dataquest-IDC report. The survey pushed industry bellwether, Infosys to eighth position from last year fourth position. India's third largest software company, Wipro does not figure among the top 20 IT employers.

According to the details of the survey 2,844 software, hardware and marketing professionals from 33 it companies employing 304,834 people in the top seven cities threw up the top 20 best IT employers based on a combination of employee satisfaction and HR scores.

The top five ranks went to TCS, HCL Info, iGate, RMSI and Synechron. The next five positions went to IBM, Capgemini, Infosys, Tavant technologies and Sun Microsystems. India's largest company, TCS, retained its numero UNO status in the best top 20 survey for the second year running.

The challenges of scaling up were countered through innovative HR practices. With almost 15 percent of its 90,000 employees based in foreign shores, TCS has replicated not just its programmes but also its ethos across multiple geographies, to achieve consistency in the workforce.

Commenting on the high points of the survey Pradeep Gupta, publisher of Cybermedia said , ''Multinational IT employers IBM Capgemini, Sun Microsystems and CSC have mastered the art of managing Indian employees to rank among the top 20 best IT employers in the country. Others, especially many India-based IT employers, will need to balance aggressive recruitment with the warmth and personal touch they used so effectively thus far, to retain people as they ramp up headcount."

Among the existing employees of Infosys, only 28.2 percent voted for it as "my dream company" in the 2007 Dataquest-IDC survey, compared to 36.6 percent last year. The employees of Infosys ranked their company very low on several parameters like growth opportunities, compensation and relevance of perks and benefits. Ironically, among the rest of the 2,844 employees of this industry-wide survey, those not working in Infosys it topped the votes as their dream company to work for.

The report also pointed out that the average attrition rate was down marginally to 14 percent from 15 percent last year. The top five reasons why it professionals changed their jobs were compensation, job posting abroad, growth opportunities, job location and technology area of work.

When asked what gave them satisfaction on the job, the employees voted career development opportunities, work life balance, organisational culture, job security and technology as the five top areas. Even though compensation was the top reason for job change, it ranked at number seven when asked what satisfied them the most.

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