Birds of passage

Executives are moving in droves from mature industries to sunrise sectors, which are growing by leaps and bounds

Ravi Venkatesh moved from Cummins (an engineering company) to Microsoft, a tech company. Pramath Sinha moved from McKinsey and Company to media house ABP as chief executive officer. And Reliance Retail has lured away several head honchos from other companies in other sectors.

These are only the top-level moves. "There is cross-sectoral movement across the board," says Achal Khanna, Country General Manager of employment services firm Kelly Services, "but it is more at the junior and middle levels because of their high aspirations."

Why is there so much movement across industry sectors? Cross-sectoral movements have been triggered successively by the IT boom, the ITES boom in 1997, the telecom wave in 2000, insurance in 2002 and now real estate, says Khanna. The movement is basically in non-specialised roles-- sales, marketing, HR, IT support, front office support, and direct sales agents in banking and financial services.

Sandeep Chaudhary, practice leader (Analytics Consulting, India and West Asia) at Hewitt Associates, says that in the war for talent that is on "across all levels, and especially at the professional level (engineers and CAs), the supervisory levels and the management cadre with between zero and eight years of experience," the mature sectors of industry such as fast moving consumer goods, banking and financial services, pharma and manufacturing are losing people to sunrise sectors such as BPO, retail, telecom, insurance and IT.

"Where will the evolving sectors get talent from? They can only poach from the mature sectors," says Chaudhary, adding that the new entrants into sunrise sectors tend to buy talent because they cannot afford the luxury of waiting. Reliance Retail, for example, is adding a vast number of CEOs.

Another reason for this trend, says Amway India HR Director Randeep Singh Sisodia, is the change in demographics of working populations. "Younger employees are more open to taking calculated risks, are more self-assured, adventurous, open and have relatively lower tolerance levels."

Hema Ravichandar, former Global Head of Human Resources for Infosys Technologies Limited, who provides strategic HR advisory to organisations and is also an independent associate with Mercer Human Resource Consulting, notes that the main pull for people to move across sectors is the promise of steeper salaries and perks, faster growth paths, leaner organization structures and a steeper learning curve: "Industries in the sunrise sector seem to offer a lot more of these hygiene and motivational factors, and are therefore the desired destinations of most people from other industries."

If on the one hand the business environment is characterised by a high degree of unpredictability, on the other, the growth possibilities are higher than ever before. This, says Mohinish Sinha, HR practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), explains why companies turn to consultants with the kind of requests that PwC for one has been getting. These, Sinha explains, are of three kinds: what should an optimal HR strategy be like; how can the behaviours of people be changed to make business strategy achieveable; and how to build greater process efficiencies and capabilities into the HR function.

And since building greater capabilities into the HR function is now a key goal in large swathes of coporate India, companies are increasingly seeing senior managers with great record records in other functions (either within the same company or from outside) take over as HR heads. Companies where this has happened inclde Infosys Technologies, M & M, Nicholas Piramal, Larsen & Toubro, and IBM.

Says Sinha of PwC: "The unpredictability of today's business environment is such that companies need people with high executive intelligence and the ability to replicate their earlier successes in their new employment. The people most in demand now are those who have multiple domain knowledge or multi-specialisation"" for example, an HR manager with excellent grasp of the oil and gas industry, or a CFO who has as much grasp of technology as an IT man."

But innate ability has to be reinforced by training. HR consultants say that if people have emerged as one of the biggest sources of competitive advantage, not being able to retain people is the biggest source of erosion of competitiveness. So what can companies do about this? "Multi-disciplinary training is emerging as the key to retention," says Chaudhary. This helps companies engage with employees on an ongoing basis.

Even companies that are hiring from outside need to intensify training for, as Ravichandar explains, "organisations that hire from across sectors would require robust orientation and training programs to impart industry specific knowledge to new employees, thereby reducing the lead time taken to get on the job. Organizations in the sunrise sector need to focus on retention strategies and be sensitive to employee engagement issues and create systemic interventions around them."

Film exhibition company PVR Ltd hires people from virtually every industry and depends heavily on on-the-job training, because there is no specific institution that trains entry-level people for the cinema exhibition industry.

Says Chief Operating Officer, Cinema Exhibitions, Amitabh Vardhan: "Internal training is a very powerful tool, because it is delivered by people who know what they are about. So we have a lot of training programmes conducted by our department heads."