ICICI Bank wants tailormade courses

ICICI Bank is talking to the West Bengal government to involve with the University of Calcutta for starting a banking and insurance course.

"We are discussing with the West Bengal government to collaborate with various universities in the state and introduce the specialised one year course on banking and insurance," said Madhabi Puri Buch, executive director of ICICI Bank.

As a part of the "Industry-Academia Partnership" initiative, where the bank has a tie up with various universities across the country to train the faculty of the for a industry specific banking and insurance course, it has already launched such programs at the Manipal University and the Delhi University among others.

"Realising the dearth of skilled people across the country we have designed banking related courses and trained the faculty first so that they may pass it on to the students," she added.

In Manipal the bank has enrolled 1200 students for the one year program and after completing it they would they would be absorbed in the bank as the Assistant Managers with same compensation.

"We would like to have similar sort of arrangement in Kolkata as well," Buch said.

Currently the bank employs around 37,000 people and in the next couple of years it would recruit at least 15,000 people.

"India have around 14 million educated workforce which is 1.5 times more than China, but out of these only 25 percent have the necessary skill to be employed at the service sector and only 30 percent of them have a reasonable command over the English language. So the question boils down to the employability and hence we are looking at the Tire III and IV towns for the talents to educate them with certain inputs in terms of banking industry and transaction in English," Buch said in the sidelines of the 11th National Conference on HRD.

The bank is looking to add another 6-7 universities under this program in the next few months.