Metallurgy degree for IT job in Singapore? Why not, says Tata Consultancy's growth markets chief

If the firm believes employees have good fundamentals, it can train them in anything.

- Ravi Velloor

India's venerable Tata Group has had a special place in Singapore's industrial history since the early 1970s, when Tata Precision Engineering opened for operations, initiating a trail of group companies that found its way to the island.

Mr Ratan Tata, the late group chairman, served for years on the Economic Development Board's International Advisory Council, and was the first Indian to be granted honorary Singapore citizenship.

This month, though, has been particularly special in the Singapore-Tata annals — the group's flagship Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the world's second-biggest information technology services firm after Accenture, brought Singapore into its universe of innovation centres with the opening of a TCS Pace centre in Changi Business Park. The new innovation and research centre was opened by Minister of State for Trade and Industry Alvin Tan on July 3.

Previous TCS Pace centres in Asia-Pacific had gone to Sydney, Manila and Tokyo. But the innovation centre in Singapore was particularly meaningful because it is the firm's first innovation hub to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation can be used in the field of research and innovation.

What's more, TCS says it has set it up with the aim of working with local start-ups, dozens of small and medium-sized enterprises — institutions that do not always have access to top consulting talent for technology as well as the local autonomous universities.

It is against this backdrop that I reached out to Mr Girish Ramachandran, TCS' president of growth markets responsible for an area that encompasses the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Latin America, to get a sense of how Singapore matches up in the AI-driven world.