With his liberal arts and sciences education from Trinity College and weekend job in eldercare, Infosys trainee Wilfried Nganyak Tentchou doesn’t have the typical resume of a business analyst.
That only made him more attractive to his new company, the Indian multinational corporation that opened a technology and innovation hub in Hartford three months ago. Infosys hired Nganyak Tentchou, 27, in February as part of a new collaboration with Trinity, an experiment in training liberal arts graduates and other nontraditional hires for the technology workforce.
“We need people that don’t just break down problems into solvable bits,” Hartford hub lead Jeff Auker said Wednesday during a panel discussion with the Hartford Consortium of Higher Education. “We need people that understand how you put those bits back together to create great experiences.”
Nganyak Tentchou and 26 other recent college graduates are the guinea pigs of this pilot training curriculum, which Infosys plans to give all of its new U.S. hires from liberal arts backgrounds. This first batch are mainly STEM graduates, but future groups will bring more academic diversity to the company.
The tech giant is seeking out new talent pools as it works to create 10,000 American jobs by 2020, a national strategy Infosys announced in 2017. So far, Infosys has made more than 7,000 hires in the U.S., and 300 in Hartford, where the company has pledged to create 1,000 jobs by 2023.
For Nganyak Tentchou — the only Trinity graduate in the pilot training program — this is an opportunity to break into the growing technology workforce, something that wasn’t accessible to him without some targeted training. He knows Infosys is a good match because the company needs problem solvers, and he needs an employer that remembers there are people behind the data.
“I put empathy first. Infosys really showed me it’s about putting people first, whether it’s the consumer or client,” he said. With projects, “the first thing I ask is, ‘Why? Why are we doing what we’re doing?’ That allows me personally to see how we could make a person’s or group’s life much better.”
Auker says Infosys loves to find liberal arts majors who “can speak tech,” and skilled data scientists who can think in the abstract.
“But,” he added, “we’re really hiring everything in between and looking at different ways to bring people in.”
For example, Infosys also plans to develop another curriculum to bridge students from community college to a four-year degree. And on Wednesday, Auker says representatives of Yale University came to the Infosys hub to discuss a potential partnership.
He’s had similar conversations with the University of Connecticut and other schools in the state. Every school has a “key superpower,” from liberal arts to nursing to design, he says — Infosys can help tune that specialty to opportunities in the tech market.
“Is it internships, is it faculty internships, is it programs like a finishing school, is it curricula?” Auker said. “We’re open to those conversations.”
“We’re new here, we’re figuring it out,” he added. “But come talk to us. Let’s sit down and talk. Let’s do something new.”
Infosys’ Trinity partnership was the first in Hartford to take shape, to the surprise of the small, private college.
Some corporations or colleges talk about the need to transform the liberal arts to meet the needs of the day, but Infosys President Ravi Kumar was willing to do something different, says Sonia Cardenas, Trinity’s vice president for strategic initiatives and innovation and dean of academic affairs.
Rather than force the teaching of tech into a liberal arts education, this pilot curriculum hands graduates new technical and professional skills and helps them translate their experience to a specific job at Infosys.
“I think that what’s unique about what we’re doing is we’ve found a major corporate partner who wants to celebrate that and believes in the power of the liberal arts,” Cardenas said. “We actually don’t want to diminish that, we want to add to it in smart ways, and I think that’s what we’re figuring out together.”
This first crop of trainees spent five weeks at Trinity getting general education in business analytics and design thinking — an approach to problem solving — and what Auker calls “the art of storytelling.”
“We want these business analysts to be the stewards of the experience for the code that we write,” he said.
Now, they’re spending three final weeks at the Infosys hub in the Goodwin Square office tower. They’re learning technical skills like Oracle business software, and preparing to work with their assigned clients.
While Infosys doesn’t expect these liberal arts graduates to have work experience in technology, the company does look for people who are curious, who tinker, who have tried to make something, Auker says.
He wants to see how applicants are using their talents, whether they have a YouTube channel or an art portfolio, a finished project on Raspberry Pi — a tiny, cheap computer used to learn programming — or an attempt at using open source code.
When criminal justice graduate Chris Discher, 32, applied to Infosys, he was able to describe how his experience in fraud investigation calls for strategic planning and critical thinking, skills that would serve him well as a business analyst.
At his interview, 26-year-old Evan Davies brought up a college internship where he designed and wrote a piece of software for a friend’s company, and how he likes to code in his free time. While Davies, a finance graduate, had found work as an analyst in real estate, he wanted to apply his skills in a different way.
“I’m not nearly qualified enough to be one of the coders” at Infosys, he added. “It was just an opportunity that made a lot of sense.”
He and Discher said more companies should consider applicants with nontraditional degrees.
“People from different backgrounds and expertise can add a lot of value because they see things through a different lens,” Discher said. “When you bring all these different views together, you can really create a great product or provide a great service.”
Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.
