Wipro Technologies wins ASTD BEST award for third time

Bangalore, Nov 13 (UNI) Wipro Technologies, the global IT services division of Wipro Limited, has won the prestigious American Society for Training and Development's BEST Awards this year for the third time in succession, ASTD Senior Director Jennifer Homer announced today.

Speaking to the media here through video conferencing from New Jersey in the United States, she said Wipro had been ranked sixth in the ASTD 2006 award programme among 39 organisations from India, South Africa and the US. Wipro was the only Indian IT organisation to win the award three years in a row and the only IT services firm in the top ten. The other Indian companies which have won such ASTD BEST 2006 awards included TCS, Infosys and ICICI, she added.

Ms Homer said seven other Indian companies were also conferred the ASTD BEST award, which recognised organisations that demonstrate enterprise-wide success through employee learning and development.

''The winners set standards of excellence for exceptional learning practices and demonstrate that a skilled workforce was vital for achieving results.'' Wipro Technologies Senior Vice-President, Talent Transformation, D Selvan, who was also present, said that through an online survey, the 2006 BEST Award had received applications from 78 organisations in seven countries. These organisations submitted quantitative and qualitative information to ASTD about their learning, development practices and programmes. The applications were assessed by members of the BEST Awards Advisory Committee, a group of experts in the learning and performance field.

He said a team of 125 dedicated faculty spread across Wipro locations were engaged in nurturing the talent of employees covering Technology, Behavioural, Domain, Project Management and Leadership topics. Wipro was geared to train up to 5,000 employees simultaneously. In 2005-06, Wipro had delivered over 3,80,000 person days of learning, of which 30 per cent was through technology enabled learning.

He said Wipro, which had made significant inroads into the Japanese market, had set up a dedicated Japanese language training centre in Chennai for the benefit of its employees. Wipro had learning centres in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon and Kolkata which were connected with virtual classroom network with two broadcast facilities in Hyderabad and Bangalore.

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