MYSORE, India — Employers around the world share a familiar complaint: Universities often don’t prepare students for fast-changing job demands. Too many new graduates need extra preparation before they’re workforce-ready.
In India, rather than waiting for higher education to catch up, major employers are designing their own education programs for new hires. It’s a model that offers a glimpse of where some American firms may be heading.
Rishi Agrawal knows the college-to-career disconnect firsthand — along with one influential company’s solution. He grew up in a small village in central India. His parents didn’t go to college, but he graduated recently with a degree in computer science from a private engineering college in Bhopal.
Indian college enrollment has more than tripled since 2005, from 14.3 million to 43.3 million, resulting in the world’s second-largest postsecondary sector after China.
But the country’s higher education system is uneven at best. “In typical Indian universities, the course is quite outdated,” Agrawal told me in December. He said obsolete textbooks and behind-the-curve professors at his college, which is affiliated with a large state university, left him frustrated. “The course was, like, 20 years old.”
It’s a lament many others share, in India and beyond. Sixty-three percent of leading global employers surveyed for the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 called skills gaps a “major barrier” to business transformation. Other analyses have found a significant disconnect between the large number of education providers worldwide who believe their graduates are work-ready and employers who disagree.
Daily classes cover foundational IT concepts, specializations such as big data and cloud computing, and soft skills. Credit: Ben Wildavsky
Agrawal found his answer at an unusual school created by Infosys, the multinational Indian services and consulting giant — a 337-acre campus with dorms and food courts, where he is busy closing the gaps his college education left. He and thousands of other newly minted engineering graduates were recently immersed in a monthslong boot camp at Infosys’s Global Education Center in Mysore, which the company launched 20 years ago. It’s run with the routines of a university but built around client needs and deadlines rather than academic calendars. When I visited in late 2025, it was housing and training 9,000 “freshers,” or new hires, at once.
For U.S. observers, the program’s most revealing aspect may be what it assumes about degrees: They signal aptitude but not readiness. Infosys hires large numbers of graduates, then treats work competence as something to be taught — and measured through repeated assessments — rather than something colleges will reliably deliver.
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Infosys created what it calls one of the world’s largest corporate universities to turn newly hired college graduates into employees ready to take on real projects. The firm, founded in 1981, and now headquartered in Bangalore, had $19.3 billion in revenue in 2025. It needs capable software engineers for client projects ranging from optimizing airline operations at Lufthansa to replacing the U.K. National Health Service’s payroll platform. Other Indian multinationals, including Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and HCL, also run giant in-house training programs.
American companies have responded to what they see as higher education’s shortcomings by building their own virtual and residential training centers for both new and seasoned employees, from Accenture’s New Joiner Experience to KPMG’s Lakehouse in Florida and Deloitte University in Texas. Intuit’s new Career Pipeline Program aims to start even earlier, giving accounting students in college real-world experience so they can be ready for work on day one.
The difference isn’t that U.S. firms don’t train — it’s that few attempt anything like a carefully structured, campus-based finishing school for entry-level hires at this scale.
Infosys has taken that impulse further than almost anyone else. Every weekday morning, trainees stream down wide, palm-lined pathways, past amenities including a huge cricket pitch and the campus pharmacy, to reach the domed classroom complex where many sessions are held. They spend long days in class learning everything from agentic AI techniques to softer skills like how to write effective emails and work in teams. “They expect us to be very professional,” Agrawal says.
Every weekday, trainees stream from their dorms to classes, which start at 9:15 a.m. Credit: Ben Wildavsky
These trainees, some of whom earned engineering degrees in fields other than computer science, begin with about eight weeks on foundational IT concepts that every programmer should know, including algorithms, databases and object-oriented programming. Then they’re assigned to one of dozens of specializations based on business needs, devoting 10 weeks or so to fields like big data, cloud computing and AI. Training in soft skills is woven throughout the program, from making presentations to being assertive without becoming aggressive.
On a bright December day, instructor Meenakshi S.’s tiered classroom hums with quiet conversation. With a small dataset of dummy patient records, trainees are writing Python code to predict annual health care costs. When a student approaches to question why the data must be standardized, Dr. Meenakshi points out that inputs like blood pressure and glucose levels are measured in different units. “Most of our courses will be about 60 or 70 percent hands-on versus conceptual or theoretical,” she tells me afterward.
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Turning new recruits into billable employees costs about $8,000 per fresher, Infosys says, and takes 19 to 23 weeks. New hires are paid during the program, but each must pass a series of assessments to stay on as full-fledged “Infoscions.”
Between 5 and 8 percent get weeded out, says Satheesha Nanjappa, the 33-year company veteran who established the training center at the request of founder Narayana Murthy. “We don’t want to lose people, because we hired them, and we’re paying them a salary,” he explains. “But at the same time, if somebody cannot pass or qualify, then they have to leave the company.”
The company’s campus includes a large, dome-shaped auditorium and several smaller cinemas that screen movies on weekends. Credit: Ben Wildavsky
Trainee Vyoma Venkatesh said the behavioral skills classes have been immediately useful in thinking about client work. Infosys treats “client orientation” as a skill you can practice, down to how you phrase an email about an unexpected delay or trying to clarify what a client wants. She thought she was already pretty good at writing emails, but a lesson on delivering bad news stuck with her: “You have to make sure people feel considered.”
The 20,000 young people who pass through the training program each year come from all over the vast country, encompassing enormous linguistic and cultural differences. Some are from megacities, others from small towns. Many are living away from home for the first time. They need to learn to communicate confidently in “business English,” to collaborate with a wide variety of classmates and to feel at ease in their upscale surroundings.
Sundar K.S., who heads the program, explains: “It’s all about people having strong generic knowledge and being able to apply it to solving some specific problem.” This pragmatic approach, with plenty of time for interaction and questions, is far from the lectures and rote learning that remain common at many Indian universities.
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In a session on client satisfaction, instructor Aparna Pappu asks, “How many of you check reviews for restaurants?” Students’ hands shoot up, then rise again when she asks about product ratings and Instagram comments. As they discuss how to meet client needs, one trainee notes a challenge: “The client doesn’t always say exactly what they want.” Pappu tells them empathy is crucial — understanding the client’s business well enough to foresee problems and offer useful solutions.
Campus amenities include a giant cricket pitch and nets, where trainees practice in the evenings after class. Credit: Ben Wildavsky
Indian universities, like their U.S. counterparts, are doing more to improve their practical offerings, but Infosys remains committed to its investment in training. The chasm between what industry wants and what graduates bring will continue “for the foreseeable future,” predicts Mohandas Pai, a former Infosys chief financial officer. Given the explosive growth of India’s highly variable universities, it’s “like living in a fairy tale” to expect the postsecondary system to produce job-ready graduates, Pai, now a startup investor, told me in his Bangalore office.
Infosys may be an extreme case, with an approach shaped by India’s size and underperforming institutions. But the direction of travel is clear: More companies in a range of nations are figuring out how to turn recent graduates into workforce contributors. Whether corporate training becomes a complement to universities, or a parallel system that quietly replaces part of what a degree used to signal, may shape the next phase of the college-to-work pipeline.
Contact editor Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story was adapted from a book the author is writing for Johns Hopkins University Press about what the United States can learn from work-focused education models in other countries.
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