Faced with a shortage of trained manpower, more banks are tying up with management colleges to offer tailor made banking courses with an assurance of a job on completion of the course.
A candidate with a regular diploma in banking or a management graduate with specialisation in banking needs about a year's time to get acclimatised to the job.
But in the case of courses tailored to meet individual bank's requirements, the learning curve is shorter and the candidate is completely ingrained into the bank's culture by the time he or she joins the bank.
Following ICICI Bank and Bank of Baroda, Kotak Bank plans to launch a post-graduate diploma in banking and relationship management jointly with Manipal University, in Bangalore.
On completion of the course, the candidate can join the bank as a probationary officer for branch banking.
Apart from the university's professors, senior officials of Kotak Bank would also conduct training programmes to make candidates familiar with the bank's products and processes as well as its working culture.
The bank will launch the programme in December and will start with a batch of 60 students in the first two quarters.
Subsequently, in every quarter the batch size will be 120. The target is to hire about 300-400 candidates through this course every year. However, this will not meet all the requirements as Kotak Bank is currently hiring 400-500 candidates every month, said Mr Subhro Bhaduri, Executive Vice-President - Human Resources.
“This course will take care of our requirement for probationary officers, who can do relationship management. Earlier, for this, we relied heavily on management graduates from campuses, which we would now try to rationalise and use this route (Kotak's post graduate diploma) more,” he said.
The course fee is Rs 3 lakh, with a finance option from Kotak Bank. An added feature is that 85 per cent of the course fee would be refunded after the candidate completes four years in the bank.
“It is a kind of reward for retention. We would like to reward them for staying with us. In four years they can see further growth within the organisation and we hope they will stay on,'' Mr Bhaduri said.