Global Capability Centers (GCCs) in India have good news to share on retention. EY’s GCC Pulse Survey shows attrition falling from 13% in 2023 to 11% in 2024 and 9% in 2025, with upskilling topping the list of strategies EY credits. That makes GCC employee retention in India a story increasingly written by learning.
The learning that produced those gains now has to move faster. EY’s same survey finds 58% of centers investing in agentic AI, 83% in GenAI, and 71% running reskilling initiatives. Employee retention through upskilling only holds if learning keeps pace with the work.
In short: GCC employee retention in India is improving, but the skills bar is rising faster than access to learning. Around 72% of GCCs need to reskill more than 40% of their workforce (PwC India). The causes are slow capability building (8.69 months on average), low AI literacy among senior leaders (27%), and younger employees who want more AI training than they get (Deloitte).
What is driving GCC talent retention?
EY credits retention strategies led by upskilling (81% of GCCs), flexibility (77%) and access to leadership (65%). Of the GCC talent retention strategies leaders point to, learning sits at the top.
In EY’s survey, upskilling ranks first among the retention levers GCC leaders cite, ahead of flexibility and leadership access. It works when employees can see learning connecting to growth, and that is where many programs fall short, as the sections below show.
The challenge: the learning bar is rising faster than access to it
PwC India’s 2026 survey of 200 senior GCC executives found that around 72% of GCCs need to reskill or upskill more than 40% of their workforce. GCCs estimate that skill gaps already affect up to 10% of value creation.
The GCC workforce skills gap shows up in how employees experience learning. PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2026 found that across the workforce, AI use is up 10 points while access to learning resources is down 8 points. Among employees with scarce skills and strong AI capabilities, 29% say they are very or extremely likely to change employer within a year. Among the majority whose skills are less scarce, only two in five say they have the learning resources they need. This is global data, not GCC-specific, but it points to the pressure GCCs are managing.
Why does it take so long to build AI capability?
Capability takes too long to build. PwC India puts the average time to turn talent into enterprise-ready capability at 8.69 months.
Leaders are still catching up. Average AI literacy among senior GCC leaders is 27%, and over 90% of GCCs say their leadership teams are not yet sufficiently AI-literate for strategic decision-making. The biggest deficits are in change management for AI-driven workforce transformation (58%) and human-AI teaming (54%). That limits how well leaders can coach, sponsor and recognize learning.
Deloitte India’s GCC Culture Sensing Report (2025) scores growth and learning at 84 out of 100 but notes that limited exposure to advanced tools and promotion bias hold employees back. Performance and results score lower, at 76, with concerns around recognition and leadership quality.
Younger employees want more than they are getting. In Deloitte’s 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey for India, only 32% of Gen Zs and 35% of millennials have completed AI training, yet 54% and 60% want more. Over 90% already use AI for learning and development, and 96% of Gen Zs and 93% of millennials are interested in senior leadership roles.
One format rarely fits everyone. Deloitte’s 2025 India survey found that Gen Zs lean toward learning platforms and subscriptions, while millennials prefer dedicated in-house programs. Alone, this doesn’t drive attrition, but a single inherited format makes the gaps above harder to close.
Six L&D Moves That Strengthen GCC Talent Retention
- Tie AI learning to roles and career paths. PwC’s workforce research finds that leading firms are 1.7 times as likely to provide ongoing, role-based AI learning.
- Build learning into the work through projects, rotations and stretch assignments, so growth is visible.
- Link skills to opportunity. Deloitte India’s Chief People and Experience Officer suggests internal credentialing based on AI skills, so teams can find the right talent for new projects.
- Upskill managers and senior leaders so they can guide and recognize the learning happening around them.
- Offer more than one lane. Pair self-paced, mobile-first learning with structured, guided paths.
- Measure capability, not just completions, and adjust after launch.
How Apposite Approaches the Learning solutions for global capability centers
Most learning programs are built once and rarely re-examined, so a format that stops working for one group can go unnoticed. Apposite uses PAIRED, a proprietary framework developed for building learning experiences, to address this. PAIRED takes each program from diagnosing learner needs through to improvement after launch, based on real usage.
To address the format mismatch between Gen Z and millennial learners, we apply PAIRED by building two delivery formats for the same content and tracking how each one performs. Deloitte’s India survey found that Gen Zs lean toward self-directed learning on platforms, while millennials prefer structured, organization-led programs. A single format tends to serve one group well and the other less so, which is why each lane is designed and measured separately.
One example of this applied is a Japanese-language learning platform. The desktop version gives millennial learners a guided, sequential path with visible progress and completion certificates. The mobile version gives Gen Z learners control over pace through swipe-based, game-style sessions of about ten minutes. Both cover the same vocabulary and grammar, so the difference lies in how learners move through the content, not in how much they are asked to learn. Programs can run on Apposite’s platform or inside a client’s existing LMS. The approach is covered in detail in our report, Two Lanes, One Team.
If you’d like to see how this could work for your own teams, connect with Apposite. We’ll help you map out what two lanes of learning could look like in your GCC.