ICICI Bank initiative trains teachers

As a part of an 'industry-academia partnership' initiative, the country's largest private sector bank"" ICICI Bank""has been conducting workshops for the faculty of various universities across the country.

The last such workshop concluded recently in Delhi with over 20 professors taking part. The focus was to train the faculty in the latest methodologies of banking, insurance and finance.

The bank has tied up, among others, with Delhi university (over 14 colleges); Utkal university, Bhubaneshwar; University of Guwahati; Banasthali Vidyapeeth , Jaipur and Madras Christian College, for providing faculty training programme and also for setting up the infrastructure (primarily computer labs) where required.

"We have done this for Banasthali Vidyapeeth, and will do it for Utkal University as well. In the case of Delhi University, the infrastructure was already in place, so we just needed to introduce our e- learning portal here. The portal is probably the largest designed financial portal by any bank and is used by 4,000 users at any time. This is being used by nearly all of these universities,' said K Ramkumar, Chief Human Resources Officer, ICICI Bank.

As a result of this initiative, various universities have agreed to prepare a proposal of a three-month elective course in finance.

"The proposal is for the benefit of all and should see no problem in getting approved. Such workshops are a wonderful attempt to help the faculty learn a lot and impart knowledge to students," says K N Tripathi, Dean (Research), Delhi University.

In order to create knowledge capital the universities have been asked to write Indian case studies in the field of banking and finance and the best case study will be awarded in November this year.

"We believe that it is our duty to build up the knowledge capital. We support the professors and research associates in undertaking research and come up with papers and study material in the domain of finance," Ramkumar adds.

Two years ago, ICICI decided to foray into education and it started sponsoring researches. "We first contacted business schools (B- schools) and convinced them on why they should change their curriculum and try and absorb information available with the industry," says Ramkumar.

The bank now has an 'ICICI Bank Chair' in almost 10 B-schools and the list includes MDI, Gurgaon, ICFAI Business School, S P Jain Institute of Management and others. Tie-ups with an equal number of colleges is in the initial phase and is in niche areas like credit skills, client backing and relationship management.

"For every one management job in the country there are five non-management jobs. Realising the need to tackle this segment of degree holders, which lack basic skills required for this field, we started meeting with the vice-chancellors of various universities and explaining them the need to vocationalise and contemprise the curriculum and teaching," explains Ramkumar.

The bank believes that there is no shortage of talent in the country and that the only way to curb attrition is to create the right kind of skills for a particular job.