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When Una Kim de Vitton set out to study the success of Indian companies, she wondered: How on earth do they do it? Indian firms have become international leaders in software development, information technology and other highly technical fields. Yet the Indian education system is notoriously weak.

"They don't technically have the talent to staff these companies," said Ms. de Vitton, a Canadian-born doctoral student at Harvard Business School currently studying in Beijing. "The question I went into this with was: How are they learning so fast? How have they managed to grow so rapidly?"

What she found amazed her. Out of necessity, Indian companies have become top-notch learning organizations, building a kind of surrogate education system that trains employees with an intensity that puts even advanced Western companies to shame.

Infosys Technologies Ltd. has built a new $120-million (U.S.) Global Education Centre in the southern Indian city of Mysore, capable of training 13,500 employees at a time. Another IT firm, Satyam Computer Services Ltd., has a School of Leadership with dorms, a golf course, swimming pool, deer park, aviary and cricket field.

Infosys spends $5,000 to $8,000 training new recruits. That's a big investment for a company that this year alone is hiring 33,000 people. Training and education cost Infosys $175-million during the 2008 fiscal year.

But Indian companies are convinced that upgrading the skills of their people is the way to win in a globalized world. Interviewing bosses at 24 Indian companies for a new report, How the Disciple Became the Guru, Ms. de Vitton and her colleagues found that virtually all of them had made training a pillar of their strategy for success.

"In the U.S., we talk about investment in training, but it's not a central issue on the minds of [chief executive officers]," said Ms. de Vitton, who compiled the report with two Duke University researchers. In India, by contrast, "this is absolutely front and centre for them. There's this incredible focus on human-resource development."

Indian companies got serious on training because they had to. The explosion of the IT and related industries led to fierce competition for the relatively few, often poorly educated graduates coming out of the Indian universities and technical colleges. The best students often leave their new companies after a year or two, hired away by competitors for better pay in a climate of soaring salaries. To succeed, Indian companies have to recruit the best people, train them up quickly and persuade them to stay.

HCL Technologies has a special recruiting team that reaches out to potential employees through blogs and social-networking websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Satyam tempts students by sending 80 of its senior executives to serve as guest lecturers on campuses. ICICI Bank has set up teleconferencing and audiovisual equipment at some bank branches so managers in other cities can interview candidates remotely.

Once landed, recruits (known in India as "freshers") undergo an intense training regimen that is rare in the West, where new employees are too often plunked in a cubicle and left to fend for themselves.

At Pantaloon Retail (India) Ltd., which operates supermarkets and stores in the new malls popping up around Indian cities, freshers get six weeks of training. That includes five and a half days at overnight training centres where they are instructed in everything from customer service to hygiene, physical and mental health and (for women) how to deal with male customers.

At ICICI Bank, trainers use online games to instruct new employees in situations they might encounter in a branch, including clearing cheques and managing unruly lineups. At Whirlpool of India Ltd., which does research and development for the home-appliance giant, senior managers are assigned to act as mentors to three or four recruits during their first two to three months on the job.

At MindTree Ltd., an IT outsourcing company, chief operating officer Subroto Bagchi stepped down in April to take on the role of full-time "gardener," focusing on instructing the company's top 100 leaders and top 150 young leaders.

MindTree has 50 self-organized "knowledge communities" that hold weekly meetings so that employees can discuss successes and failures. Pantaloon has store-wide and city-wide storytelling contests that let new employees share ideas and best practices.

Apart from raising a company's game, good training helps it fight attrition. HCL, which trains new employees for 60 to 90 days and gives all employees an average of 10 days of training a year, managed to reduce its annual attrition rate to 12 per cent from 20 per cent three years ago.

Ms. de Vitton and her colleagues Gary Gereffi and Vivek Wadhwa subtitle their report, "Is it Time for the U.S. to Learn Workplace Development from Former Disciple India?" The answer is obvious, not just for the United States but for Canada and every other Western country.

As they write, "Indian companies have learned how to take the output of a weak education system and turn graduates into world-class engineers and scientists. Imagine what could be done with a worker base that has received the high quality of education available" in the West.

Imagine indeed.

IT training

Training per new recruit at select Indian companies

Continuing training

KATHRYN TAM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

SOURCE: DUKE UNIVERSITY, HARVARD LAW