Our People
5 schools, 179 programmes, over 15,000 learners—that’s how much Hindalco Technical University has grown since it was set up in 2017.
Every industry is built on a foundation of technical know-how and specific skillsets. Hindalco believes it is important to have employees with excellent core technical competencies and that employees have opportunities to continually upskill as technology evolves. The company has made continuous efforts to enhance employee experience, instil a better sense of ownership and build an empowered workforce that can help create a thriving, high-speed, high-performance contemporary organisation.
A few years ago, Hindalco took on the resposibility of enhancing its employees’ technical expertise and skills in line with the company’s stated purpose of manufacturing materials that make the world greener, stronger and smarter. For that reason, the Hindalco Technical University (HTU) was established in 2017 as a reflection of the organisation’s commitment to fostering technical excellence in its workforce, so as to achieve higher productivity and to prepare them to tackle technical challenges.
HTU now has five schools catering to mining, refinery, power, smelting and downstream that offer programmes designed and tailored by technical experts to meet industry requirements and that are relevant to current trends. The segmented and customised technical training programmes are accessible to relevant employees.
Learning during lockdowns
When Covid-19 struck in 2019 and the country went into lockdown, the HTU team faced many challenges to continue training and upgrading employee skills. The result was ‘e-HTU’–an engaging initiative that made use of technology to provide uninterrupted learning. The online open-learning platform offers world-class learning programmes to engineers, supervisors and workers on the shop floor.
Employees were able to join training sessions from any location, and this allowed more employees to learn and train. These online sessions not only helped employees develop their digital skills and gain knowledge of sustainability and adoption of new technologies, it also helped to bridge the gaps between units and corporate departments–by collaborating with various stakeholders such as manufacturing units and digital, maintenance and research and development departments.
Steady growth
E-learning continued to take on scale. In FY21, HTU organised 117 virtual training and e-learning events that delivered 650+ hours of technical training. More than 15,000 employees from Hindalco and other ABG businesses participated in these training sessions.
HTU also dived deeper into subject matter. It developed 16 customised e-modules on GVC application and introduced 350+ courses on safety and sustainability. The HTU team collaborated with over 25 original equipment manufacturers to enhance technical learning, creating internal trainer capability that covered 42 trainers across mines, upstream and downstream. Another innovation was a training programme for the installation of Eternia windows.
In many ways, HTU supports Hindalco’s business plans. In FY22, HTU began three new training initiatives for employees, to strengthen their skills in niche areas.
- Specialty Knowledge Integration Programme (SKIP) – Flagged off at Muri plant, SKIP focuses training on specialty chemicals.
- Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) – Strengthens the IPR portfolio and protects intellectual property of technical resources.
- Data Analytics through artificial intelligence and machine learning – Helps plant professionals understand key process parameters through big data analysis.
FY22 saw HTU hitting a peak; 179 training programmes that included participation from 14,000+ employees; more than 30 programmes in collaboration with external partners that saw more than 900+ participants; and 24 programmes on safety and sustainability attended by more than 3,000 employees.
The school’s future plans include building and encouraging internal training resources and broadening the scope of the programmes to include supervisors and workmen. With its sharp focus on employee needs, HTU is well on its way to building its reputation as a technical academy.
