Tesco, the ubiquitous UK supermarket chain that began as a humble grocery cart in London in 1919, is today the third largest retailer in the world. With over 6000 stores, 500,000 employees, and an average of 60 million customers, the grandiose scale of operations prompted the retail giant to establish the Tesco Hindustan Service Centre (HSC), the global business services arm for Tesco worldwide in Bengaluru, India, in 2003.

Tesco was the first international retailer to launch a full-fledged service center in India, long before the retail boom changed how we shop today. The retailer has entrusted HSC as the command post for creating and executing strategic initiatives for the company, including IT, business, finance, commercial, and property-related operations. Essentially, every operation that drives internal and external platforms at every retail store of Tesco around the world is manned out of Bengaluru.

With rapidly evolving complexities in managing retail operations, Tesco invested in concentrated efforts for skills enhancement of the HSC workforce to meet challenges dynamically and capitalize on opportunities for change at the right time. Tesco HSC instituted a comprehensive two-pronged training program for its employees, comprising technical training and domain knowledge expansion.

Imparted by in-house practitioners and online coaching, the technical training was designed as a blended program to apprise and instill proficiency in technological advancements relevant to the retail industry.

To build domain expertise, Tesco HSC founded the Retail Certifications program. This crucial element would arm Tesco HSC to be ever-prepared to handle emerging operational issues across verticals. Tesco was cognizant of the fact that while the staff possessed technical know-how, a lack of domain knowledge about the intricacies of the retail industry would drastically affect their ability to discharge their responsibilities effectively.

In an elaborate and structured approach to gradually build competencies to operate optimally in the retail arena, the Retail Certification program had three hierarchical categories- Brown, Silver, and Gold Certifications. While every new recruit was mandated to complete the Brown certification within a year of joining the company to gain in-depth insights into the retail industry, the Silver certification, comprising 30 modules spread over six months, was expected to be completed by staff at certain levels in the organization.

As the most advanced level in the Retail Certification program, Tesco wanted the Gold certification curriculum to be designed as a ‘mini master’s degree’ that would encapsulate a heightened exposure to pure technologies such as Hadoop cluster, ETL, data warehousing, and micro strategies so that the staff would eventually gain expertise in big data analytics, the overarching technology that would drive the ‘business of operations.’