Meet Dr. Amit Upadhyay whose passion is to Skill India.

Interview with Dr. Amit Upadhyay of Horizon Outsource Solutions Pvt. Ltd on the evolution of his company and Skilled India.

1. What was the thought behind the formation of this company?

A friend of mine named Kenneth Philip who was the vice president of Sharekhan is responsible for where i am today , as he was the one who had offered me a 25 seater manpower outsourcing job, 10 years back when I was pursuing my PHD, which today is around 4300 manpower. To be honest, I never wanted to be in manpower outsourcing, as I had various aspirations of being a writer or something completely different. And today when I look back to all the people I have associated with along the years I don’t think I will be able to let go. It was a move in the right direction.

2. How widespread is your company?

You tell me about a state and I’ll tell you where I am. We are in all states. We are on-site i.e the client’s premise. Chennai, Bangalore, Coimbatore, covered mostly all southern parts and now in Kolkata, Gurgaon. We are in 7 to 8 locations in Mumbai (Navi Mumbai).

3. What kind of people do you hire and what is the process of hiring them?

The people we recruit today is semi-skilled and skilled people. And we aren’t into just a particular sector, whatever comes to us we hire them accordingly.  So there are 8 to 10 ways of hiring people and we use every possible efficient ways to hire them. However it’s done after we get the mandate of the client and accordingly the hiring process takes place. The client personally sometimes sits for the interview thus not only us but the client appoints with us as well.

4. Can you tell us something about the training programme and analysis?

Yes, the training is given by us .There are two types of training i.e soft skills and product training where we are well arrayed with soft skilled training and in case of  product training, our trainers are certified by the clients. After the training there is an on the job training that goes on for 10 to 30 days depending on what the product or service is. And then later on there is an immediate manager which can be a team leader, senior manager or manager takes over from the trainer and eventually the team reports under us. As for the analysis, it takes place after every fifteen days which we call training need analysis (TNA) where we identify who needs to be retrained or refreshed.

5. Your contribution for skilled india and thoughts on government support for your business?

I think they have been doing the best that they could as compared to whatever has happened in the past. As for contributing towards skilled india we are planning to increase our manpower to 25,000 in various sectors eventually.

6. Where do you see yourself five years from now and who are you looking out for now?

We are trying to explore new areas and enter into new ventures and in five years time we see ourselves more established into than what we are today. We are looking out for semi skilled people for recruitment like maybe 12^th pass and educate them in their field of interest.