Global Adjustments launches e-learning portal

Monday, 19 March 2007, 17:30 IST
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Chennai: Global Adjustments, a relocation service provider for people coming to and going out of India, launched an e-portal for its learning and relocation services. The portal - www.globalindia.net.in - was launched by Dayanidhi Maran, union minister of telecommunications. GA is a 10-year-old company, teaching professionals going abroad on work and foreigners coming for posting to India about each others' culture, customs and practices and business etiquette. "India is growing at a tremendous pace and more and more multi-national companies are looking to setting up base in India. Services such as these become very essential and useful and GA will surely address the growing need for professionals from India travelling abroad," Maran said. The need was measured by American Consul General in Chennai, David T. Hopper, who disclosed that it was GA that had trained the consulate's visa-issuing officials in recognising Indian needs and practices. Lakshmi Narayanan, the vice president of Cognizant Technology Solutions, the biggest American company in India employing nearly 30,000 people, said on the occasion that at least 6,000 of his technical experts are at any point of time on tour abroad "just for system integration". GA's pilot project for developing the e-portal was done with Cognizant employees. Global Adjustment chief operating officer Rajeswar Balasundaram told IANS: "All these years our operations have been live, we have been teaching students directly and they were coming to us or we going to them. Now, it is for the first time that we are teaching on the net and we expect the impact to be very far reaching. Individuals wanting to access cross-cultural skills and lessons can do it, online." The e-portal is a paid service and individuals are being given a launch period discount. Anyone can enter the portal free and browse through an introductory service. This free content layer provides a sample of the entire content. Anyone wanting to access the complete course, can do so by paying 1,800 and get the lessons over a period of about eight weeks on the PC. The initial content is for 12 hours of lessons, and GA hopes to scale the content to 120 hours of material, including cross-culture lessons for non-English speaking countries. Cognizant, Infosys and other companies are expanding to China and Latin America and such skills were becoming more and more necessary, experts said. GA's delivery partner for the public will be Sify-iway and one can access the lessons through any Sify station. For the portal, a signature tune has been set by noted music teacher T V. Gopalakrishnan. Its technology partner is Netlink. "For better understanding of India," GA CEO Ranjini Manian said, "professional visitors need to understand India first, strategies and then act to succeed." There are about three million professionals working in the IT sector in India, companies like TCS employ 20,000 people abroad, Wipro employs 11,000 people overseas. Set up in 1995, Global Adjustments has clients from 70 nations, including Cognizant and TCS.
Source: IANS