Treating freshers in an IT project: The Outlier perspective

I am a strong believer in the power of human potential and creativity - I believe that it's more important to have the right people than the right process, moreover the only true asset and competitive advantage of an IT organisation is the accrued knowledge and attitude of it's workforce. How do we build an organisation where knowledge and professional excellence is valued more important than anything else? In this post, I would like to focus on the starting tier of every organisation - the fresh recruits from college and their utilisation strategies.
Almost every top Indian IT organisation that I know of, has excellent induction and training facilities for new recruits. The training facilities of TCS, Infosys and Satyam are world class and caters to it's workforce from across the globe. Every new recruit to these companies will have to go through and qualify a two to three month long induction course. The recruits are given intensive training on fundamentals of computer science, software engineering (considering that they could be from backgrounds as varied as Civil or Textile engineering), communication skills, business etiquette and are made to specialise in one technology (popular options include Java, .NET, Mainframes, Oracle Apps and SAP). All is well the training ends - now after the training the recruits will be allocated to projects (not necessarily in the technology they specialised in!) and the less fortunate among them will have to occupy the famed 'bench' ('Bench' is one of the most despicable and demeaning words in the IT industry for me - it brings forth images of a poultry farm where cattle is fed and kept without doing any physical work in the hope that buyers will come in the future. Talent rots on bench and these PCMMI Level 5 organisations virtually have no 'bench management' policies in place. This deserves a separate post).
The primary focus of this post is to discuss how fresher's are utilised in a project and the pivotal role played by the first project in launching the career of an IT professional.
Training and a live project are two completely different ball games and it has been my experience that one learns more in a project than any long and intensive training course. There are potentially two ways in which you can utilise them - be cautious about their abilities, not load any complex and difficult tasks on them, give them further process training, let them shadow with experienced resources (let them 'feel, see and learn'!) and allocate the easiest (and in turn the most trivial and mundane) task. The other more radical way of handling them is to 'throw them in the lion's den' - give challenges to them from the first day, include them in solving difficult problems, ask them to work on technologies that they have not been trained on and stretch them beyond their limit. Which strategy works best?
Common wisdom and experience has shown that the freshers like tender flowers need to be handled with care and thus the first approach is the most suitable when it comes to utilising raw talent. But, this is a defeatist approach. If the organisation aims at building people with an attitude to take up any technical challenge, people who will not wilt under pressure and people who will solve problems - they will need to look at adopting approach two to groom the freshers.
The capacity to learn and mould one's mind is the maximum when one starts his/her career and the role played by the first project in harnessing the potential of an individual is immense. Malcom Gladwell in one of his talks mentions about an experiment done in a US school. The school used to segregate a class based on the intelligence of students and used to have different batches for different groups of students. The school did an interesting exercise when they put some average performing students in the high IQ batch and gave them the same intensive training. To their surprise, they found that the average performing students were scoring as well as the high IQ students once they received the same coaching. This principle is written all over Galdwell's new book Outlier which I reviewed in the previous post. My argument for a strategy to utilise fresher's in an IT project is drawn from the same line. Putting up challenges and difficult problems in front of an eager mind all charged up to prove him/herself is the best way to groom an individual. The confidence and never say die attitude that this bestows on the individuals will remain with them forever.
There is another point to it - the incremental advantage that knowledge and experience gives an individual. Let's do a thought exercise of two fresher's 'A' and 'B' who come from the same college and who got the same training - utilised in entirely different ways in a project. 'A' is not given any meaningful work and is assigned to monitor a system and report any issues with the same, he is also asked to write up documents for the development done by his senior team mates. 'B' on the other hand is asked to develop a piece of a critical interface with a third party vendor. In turn, he has to learn a technology that he has no exposure to and meet a strict deadline. Unarguably the learning and experience of 'B' is much greater than that of 'A' and by the end of the project. The initial headstart that 'B' has got will put him exponentially above 'A'. Managers would prefer 'B' to 'A' for his 'skills', 'attitude' and 'experience' in the next assignment and this trend will continue - 'B' enjoying incremental advantage over his counterpart simply due to the better exposure and utilisation he got in the first project. Interestingly, the book McKinsey Way(find the entire PDF version of the book here) which talks about the consulting strategies of McKinsey emphasizes the importance of giving tough and customer facing assignments to fresh recruits.
I am convinced that it's not just necessary having excellent induction programs for freshers, but its paramount that the grooming is continued atleast in the first project of each fresher and that organisation will be able to reap rich dividends in the future.