Dale Carnegie finishing school in Karnataka

US-based training institute, Dale Carnegie & Associates, has opened a finishing school in association with an Indian training institute, Walchand PeopleFirst Ltd.

The institute, to be called Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School, will impart soft skills' training to students interested in IT, ITeS, retail, banking, telecom and FMCG.

The school will cover 25,000 sft, which will eventually be ramped up to a 35-acre campus at Ramanagaram satellite town with an investment of Rs 70 crore. The school will train students in communication skills, verbal skills and personality development. The course will be targeted at students from small towns who are technical proficient but are not proficient in communication skills.

Headquartered in New York, Dale Carnegie has a presence in over 80 countries.

In India, the training institute has corporate training centres in Delhi, Pune and Bangalore. It has trained over 12,000 people in India so far. It has also been working with schools and colleges in Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. Dale Carnegie and Walchand are now planning to start a second finishing school in Maharashtra.

Graduates, who have scored 45 per cent marks and have some technical knowledge as well as knowledge of English will be eligible. The course's duration will range from four months to six months. The fee for the course will be Rs 40,000. According to Dale Carnegie, the course will also include 16 weeks of classroom instruction and eight weeks of industry internship.

"A lot of companies will be visiting us this year and they will give us their requirements. So we will see to it that the courses help train students in the skills these companies require," Walchand PeopleFirst Ltd's chairperson and managing director Pallavi Jha said. The institute plans to train around 8,500 students in the first year.

"The curriculum focuses on developing and enhancing the very skill sets that employers seek while recruiting candidates," Dale Carnegie Training's CEO Raj Bowen said.

This is the second finishing school in Karnataka. The first one was an IT finishing school that came up in Mysore a few months ago. The state is also going to get a finishing school for biotechnology that is likely to be launched by the end of the year.