Infosys, one of India’s largest IT companies with revenue of US$4 billion has engaged with British Council to bring ‘English on your desktop’ to professional and student audiences in the corporate sector in India.

The agreement, signed in July 2008, provided for a Learn English Professionals (LEP) web banner on the Infosys Campus Connect portal and on Sparsh, the Infosys intranet website.

The Campus Connect portal reaches out to 4829 faculty members and 120,795 students as of December 2008 in around 500 engineering colleges spread across the country. And by placing our LEP banner on Sparsh, we gain access to a further 100,000 ‘‘Infoscians’ (or Infosys employees worldwide) who access the Sparsh intranet on a daily basis.

Through this innovative initiative, both British Council and Infosys aim to address the crunch the employment sector is facing in finding recruits with the right competencies. Both Campus Connect and Sparsh provide teachers and learners with resources that support self development. LEP helps individuals reach their professional aspirations by developing English skills required at the workplace and helping them prepare for English language exams.

The results have been impressive. In August and September, following the launch of the banner in July, the Infosys Campus Connect website topped the list of LEP referrals. In September just over 25% of LEP page hits came from India. ‘English on your desktop’ will not only bring potentially hundreds of thousands of users for LEP but will also promote our World Authority status and help us to win business with the top Indian ITES companies, which is the aim of the corporate strand of Project English

Our next steps are to provide Infosys with regularly updated syndicated content, hold focus groups with users and to run ‘webinars’, virtual seminars, with engineering colleges around India. We are currently talking to other large Indian companies (e.g. HCL) and UK companies with offshore operations in India (e.g. Barclays) to introduce LEP to their employees.

For more information contact Stephen Jenner or Philip Clegg.

www.britishcouncil.org/professionals
www.infosys.com
http://campusconnect.infosys.com

Stephen Jenner, Janaki Murali and Philip Clegg at the Second English Policy Dialogue conference, organized by the British Council in Kolkata 19 November 2008.