Friday, June 11, 2010

State Bank of India to provide training to its employees to make them competitive

State Bank of India will be providing intensive training to its over two lakh employees to upgrade their skills so that they can efficiently perform their duties in the changing business environment and competition. The employees working at various levels in banking technology, e-learning and other areas will take up the training program.

The bank is making arrangements to make its employees attend a two-week training program once in 18-24 months. Ms Mahpara Ali, Head, Strategic Training Unit (STU) of SBI, told Business Line told, “Our major focus is on upgrading the skills of employees in view of the major expansion of workforce in recent years and competitive business environment.” She added, the main focus of STU is to provide training to at least 1.2 lakh employees a year.

The STU is a unified training establishment, was set up recently, and is linked with over 50 learning centers and four apex training units of SBI located in different parts of the country.

Ms Ali said, “The idea is to consolidate entire training process for undertaking skilling and re-skilling of our employees. We will do this through e-learning predominantly.” STU is reviewing skill requirements for the bank and examining the resources and capabilities.

However STU has designed over 150 e-learning course modules in key areas such as risk management, foreign exchange, treasury handling or credit proposals and also front office management.

STU has in-house developed the entire-technology platform for e-learning modules. At present SBI is not seeing it training unit as an independent source for earning revenue. The official said, “Our focus is only on staff. However, we have trained staff of other public sector banks and some foreign banks on their request on cost-to-cost basis.”

Earlier SBI has also provided training to personnel from the Vigilance Department, Central Bureau of Investigation and State-run insurance companies.

Ms Ali informed the bank has assigned a separate budget for training she did not revealed the exact figure.

She said, “All the infrastructure is owned by SBI. We have over 400 full-time faculties in addition to many visiting experts. Training huge staff itself means lot of expenditure.”

From past two years SBI has been a major recruiter among the banks. In the last two years it has hired over 60,000 officers and clerks and is fulfilling our staff requirement for the current year.

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