Hero Mindmine eyes overseas markets

Hero Mindmine, the training and development arm of the Hero Group, is foraying into the international market. It has signed an agreement to train Oman nationals for a period of one year in the area of customer service, sales and communication skills.

The company has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saud Bahwan Group of Oman to tap the training services market in Persian Gulf countries like the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait.

Hero Mindmine chief Asheesh Gupta said: "We are looking at becoming the training powerhouse in Asia-Pacific by 2007 and a single partner to our clients for all learning and development needs like training delivery, content development, training consulting and assessment & measurement. These markets will help us to achieve the target."

The company also has chalked out aggressive plans to offshore its training consulting and content development services in developed markets such as the US and UK.

In a recently study on Fortune 500 companies, it was pointed out that the they spent as much as $200 million annually on learning and development. Out of this, 55 per cent went into content design and administration.

"The content design and administration market offers huge potential in developed markets and we are very keen on tapping it as it gives us first mover advantage," Gupta added.

Gupta said a major company in the UK had already outsourced training consulting and development services to Hero Mindmine. Refusing to name the company, he said Hero Mindmine would develop learning and knowledge management strategy and plans to support organisation strategy.

"Content development will focus on creating customised training solutions and material for in-company as well as third party development by clients, redesign existing training, integrate e-learning with organisation's training strategy and provide extensive expertise in instructional system design and distance learning."

The company has over 200 employees with 18 training facilities. It was earlier studying the Chinese market to train people in the services sector but later shelved the plans citing language and cultural barriers.