Indian IT bellwether Wipro Ltd Monday unveiled a novel initiative to impart soft skills to undergraduate students across the country to improve their employability in back-office operations and other services sectors.

"The Wipro integrated skill enhanced (WISE) programme is currently offered to undergraduates at Techno India group in Kolkata on a pilot basis and will be extended nationwide to train about 5,000 students by this fiscal-end (2013-14) in cities and towns," the global software major said in a statement here.

On completing the 60-hour programme, the company will asses the trained students for certification, making them eligible for a placement in the company after an interview round as against multiple levels of screening conducted to recruit freshers.

"The programme consists of modules that give students flexibility to work over three months along with the graduation course," said Wipro head for back-office operations such as business process management (BPM) Subhasish Biswas.

For instance, the business communication skills module, developed by the leading training firm TaraSpan Solutions Ltd, and the company's corporate readiness module will prepare them in developing domain expertise required for back-office services.

The industry's representative body National Association of Software and Services Companies' (Nasscom) IT-enabled Services (ITeS) sector skills council has designed the curriculum and training methodology for the programme, which includes periodic classroom connectivity to enable students to interact with trainers.

"Enhancing employability to role-specific requirements in the IT, BPM and other services sector is the way forward to scale up readily deployable talent pool for the industry," Nasscom executive director Sandhya Chintala said in the statement.

As the programme empowers the students with communication and presentation skills in addition to basic domain knowledge, the company hopes the certification will be recognised in other service industries.

"The initiative, which is the need of the hour, will make our youth employable, as they will be able to leverage the opportunity and aspire to be part of self-development," said Techno group director Pritimoy Bhattacharya.