Intellect Design Arena Ltd

As Global Head of Learning and Development, I am responsible for designing, formulating and driving the talent development strategy across the enterprise. The role involves:
-	Developing a skills / competency architecture through identification of top performance skills and future skills relevant for the organization to remain competitive in the marketplace.
-	Design and Delivery of Leadership Development programs in partnership with renowned Universities.
-	Driving a culture of continuous professional development across all levels in the organization leveraging technology to deliver learning in the flow of work. 
-	Design and Execution of key talent initiatives across the organization like 360-degree feedback for leaders, Talent Round Table discussions and Coaching Leaders for conducting Performance Development Dialogues with the team members.

Head - Learning and Development

Educational Group

Consulted for a leading educational group in Tamil Nadu. Also consulted for an Educational Start Up firm helping them establish a learning architecture.

Independent Consultant

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Role: Head - Global Learning Delivery 

As Head of Global Learning Delivery, I am responsible for the overall Learning operations globally.

I lead the planning and management of the training budget for the enterprise for the last 3 years.  Partnered well with my peers in the function to roll out a robust learning catalog and offerings by planning the investments in the right areas and ensuring the effectiveness of the learning programs delivered. 
I lead the execution of the Skilling framework globally. This initiative is aimed at fulfillment of new billable positions through re- / up-/ cross-skilling of internal talent. The team arrived at the Talent Segmentation Framework and the Skilling Paths for various combination of Point of Arrival and Point of Departure skills. 
My People Management and Leadership capabilities were consistently showcased over the past 3 years, through the high scores achieved in the Business Effectiveness Survey.  I lead the largest, globally distributed and diverse team of 183 L&D professionals within the function with less than 12% attrition and 86% engagement level. 

Learning Digitisation: 
 
I researched, piloted and led the roll out of the virtual learning infrastructure for Cognizant Academy. Stabilized the framework across Americas and Europe before institutionalizing the same globally. Today, 67% of the total learning delivered is through this backbone . 
I led the deployment of hands-on virtual technology labs for practice for learners to ensure effective learning transfer and on the job performance of the learners post training. This methodology has helped save the organization several thousands of dollars on licenses and hardware. 
Under my leadership the team formulated a new model for Early Engagement of talent from campus through the roll out of a online engagement platform promoting self-learning through gamification and code challenges in 2017.

Senior Director - Learning & Development

Cognizant

Role: Program Director for a large transformational program
 
I led the team that designed and rolled out a large transformational program - Cognizant Career Architecture for two key horizontals covering 90% of the eligible workforce within these business units globally. Leveraged on my negotiation skills to establish and build partnerships for the first time with several OEM’s for enterprise learning contracts and ensured relevant learning is available for the highly skilled technical workforce in these horizontals. Cognizant was able to showcase capability in VMware, AWS, PEGA and SFDC through deployment of certified workforce for strategic customer engagements. Today, Cognizant has the largest Pega Certified workforce globally. 
 
Role: Program Director - Learning Analytics
 
As part of my leadership role in Corporate learning, I led my function to craft the enterprise learning measurement strategy, rolled out the measurement processes, set up the data collection methods and published learning dashboards through the self-service model. This led to significant improvement in the performance of L&D function, sustained over a 5 year period. 

Role: Program Manager - Near Shore Development Centers
 
I have set up and led the L&D operations at all our near shore development centers - Shanghai; Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Valladolid . 
Created a curriculum for training campus graduates taking into account the cultural aspects and graduate education in these countries. Ensured the trainees who graduated out of the program were assimilated into business with about 65% of them getting into billable roles in the first 6 months. 
I built and cultivated a strong set of local training partners in each country to ensure smooth learning delivery. The chosen trainers were bilingual so as to ensure learning effectiveness as well as learner engagement and experience.

Director - Learning & Development

Role: Head - Learning Delivery - Americas & Europe
I led the team in building and managing the training budget across Americas and Europe between 2010 and 2012. I was also responsible for hiring and managing delivery personnel (12 staff);  identifying client training and business needs, determining appropriate curriculum and negotiating training contracts with external partners. 
I re-engineered the team processes to allow for higher levels of productivity and collaboration to meet spikes in learning demand, resulting in 100% compliance with target delivery dates for the programs across Americas and Europe. I maintained the same team size and pyramid while increasing the throughput by 56% from 2012 to 2013. 
I embarked on an initiative in 2011-2012 to share our practices with the Corporate learning industry and to benchmark ourselves against the best. I drove this globally as a change initiative within the function and we saw strong results after the first 12 months. Cognizant Academy was ranked #1 among the learning organizations globally by Association for Talent Development (ATD, formerly ASTD - American Society for Training & Development) in 2013 and 2014. Cognizant Academy won several prestigious awards such as the Brandon Hall (5 awards in 2014 and 2015), Training Top 125 from the Training Magazine and Learning in Practice award from the Chief Learning Officer, CLO.
 
Shared Services model:
Based on my research, I conceptualized and rolled out the Shared Services model for Cognizant Academy in 2012; thereby enhancing the productivity levels of the team and increasing the job satisfaction of the team members. In the survey undertaken in 2013, we observed a 5% jump in the satisfaction scores from the Learning Delivery team members. The framework has been scaled and today the shared services team has a CSAT of 80% and FTR of 82% with a volume of over 40K tickets in a quarter.

Associate Director - Learning & Development

Role: Performance Consultant
I led the roll out of a Professional Development Program - Career Compass in 2009 for multiple business units at North America. Achieved learning coverage to the tune of 58% across the distributed workforce in the geography in the first year; which was significant as learning coverage was very poor at North America prior to the roll out. 
I set up the large-scale corporate learning operations in the Americas and Europe in 2009 which delivered 3 million hours of learning annually at its peak. This provided coverage to more than 12,000 employees in Year 1; achieving >85% L1 feedback scores. This milestone truly established the fact that Learning is Global at Cognizant.

Role: Program Manager - Graduate Training Program
Practitioners and Experts from the business were empaneled as trainers and mentors for the delivery of the Graduate Training Program. I designed and rolled out a Rewards and Recognition program for the empaneled trainers in recognition of their contribution to Learning. Through this effort, we executed the Graduate Training Program in India between 2000 and 2005 with 100% internal trainers for Technology and Functional Skills during the period of high growth for the organization. During this time period, we had a peak of 60 batches running in parallel across India and the graduation reliability index was always 100%.
 
Learning Technology:
Collaborated with the internal R&D team to customize the Open Source Assessment Engine “Moodle” for administration of all exit tests and internal certification programs. 
I led the team that conceptualized, designed and co-created the Requirements Specification for the Online Management System for the management of the Graduate Training Program in 2007. System was put into production in 2008 . Several processes and workflows were automated using the system thereby delivering operational efficiency of around 65% through automation and digitization.

Senior Manager - Learning & Development	

Role: Project Manager - Continuing Education Programs
 
As a thought leader in the L&D space at Cognizant, I pioneered the deployment of video and web-conferencing solutions for learning to connect business and industry leaders to the distributed global workforce, boosting productivity through collaboration tools and social learning.

I was selected as the Lead Auditee for Cognizant Academy for the ISO, CMMi Level 4 and PCMM Level 5 certification audits. I contributed to the entire process documentation related to the Training KPI.  I ensured relevant artifacts and procedures can be showcased against the standards. Cognizant passed through the external certification audits with zero non-conformance on Training related KPI’s. 

Got trained as the Functional Area Representative from Cognizant Academy during the enterprise implementation of PeopleSoft HCM, PeopleSoft ESA and PeopleSoft ELM enterprise applications, which are the core backbone systems at Cognizant today.

Manager - Learning & Development	

Role: Implementation Manager - Continuing Education Programs
 
Got trained and certified as Six Sigma Black Belt in August 2005. Project undertaken was on building automated workflows for publication of the Monthly Training Calendar within the Learning Management System. This helped save 50% of the work for the training administrators.

Senior Executive Learning & Development 

Role: Implementation Lead - Graduate Training Program
 
Lead the end-to-end implementation of the Graduate Training Program in India. Scaled up the model pan-India.
 
Awards:
 
I was awarded the prestigious “Associate of the Year” award in 2003. I was one of the first recipients of the award from a corporate function. I was recognized for scaling up the implementation of the Graduate Training Program pan-India ensuring consistent quality and effectiveness.

Executive - Learning & Development

Role: Implementation Lead - Graduate Training Program
 
I delivered training sessions on Software Engineering; Good Programming Practices; Data Structures and C; Systems Analysis and Design for the trainees. I achieved consistently high L1 feedback scores and 100% first time pass rate for L2 scores for all sessions handled by me. 
 
Learning Design:
 
I designed and developed the curriculum for the Graduate Training Program using the DACUM process in 2000. Case Studies were developed for the “My First Real Project” to ensure that the trainees went through an Action Learning Project before graduating out from the program.

Junior Executive - Learning & Development

Loyola College

Based on my Academic credentials and the feedback ratings I obtained from my Undergraduate and Post Graduate students, I was selected as a member of the Core team to obtain the necessary accreditation for the start of the MCA; B.Sc and M.Sc Computer Science degree programs through the self-financing mode. Along with the core team members, I put together the required documentation for the accreditation and also drafted the course syllabi for multiple courses at the Undergraduate as well as Postgraduate levels. 

As part of my responsibilities, I drafted the formulation of the admission procedures; faculty hiring process and the setup of the lab infrastructure for the Department of Computer Science. 

I led the team that designed the Entrance Tests for the intake of the first two batches of students for Master of Computer Applications and Master of Science (Computer Science) courses .

Lecturer

I am a talent transformation leader with more than 20 years global experience in defining, leading, and delivering large-scale talent initiatives. I am known for my collaborative and hands-on leadership style. I push my teams to challenge themselves, think creatively and evolve. 

Specializing in Learning & Development and Organizational Development within large, highly matrixed organizations across the IT Services and IT Products space, I have expertise in developing an overarching enterprise wide skills / competency framework, aligning learning strategies with the business need, development and deployment of learning and leadership development programs, making the best use of technology and people to enable the speed, scale and spread of learning programs across the enterprise. I believe in cultivating deep relationships with cross-organizational stakeholders, partners, and cross-functional global team members. As a Leader who has lived and worked around the globe, I understand cultural differences from multiple perspectives. I am proud to foster diversity, inclusion and associate empowerment to attract and retain high performing talent, enhance the teams’ brand and drive success. I am known for my ability to influence for change and develop talented Human Resources professionals into a cohesive, high performance team that quickly gain the respect of its business partners and rigorously execute to plan. 

In my current role, my team won the Chairman’s Team Excellence Award in 2020, the first such award for the entire Human Resources team, for designing and executing the flagship leadership development program despite the challenge posed by the pandemic. During my role as the Head of Global Learning Delivery, Cognizant Academy was ranked #1 among the learning organizations globally by Association for Talent Development (ATD, formerly ASTD - American Society for Training & Development) in 2013 and 2014.



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