ICICI ties up with colleges to tap talent

The ICICI Group, the country's largest private sector financial services provider, has signed agreements with colleges and universities across the country to create a talent pool of around 1,00,000 people in banking and insurance over the next five years.

The group has lined up a slew of educational and training courses to create the talent pool and may recruit around 20-25 per cent of the total pool.

The bank has set aside Rs 100-120 crore for the current year for all the training initiatives, up from Rs 60-70 crore a year ago, to address the issue of talent shortage in the banking and financial services sector.

In an effort to build a strong industry-academia relationship, the group is planning to reach out to 150-200 colleges in the next 12-15 months, which lack adequate financial support, and institute a learning centre in each college.

The group is planning to provide hardware support to these colleges in addition to the provision of around 250 e-learning courses in banking and financial services.

"The attrition rate in the banking and financial services industry is around 20-22 per cent. Given India's growth story and the abundance in job opportunities, retaining people is a challenging task. The best way to address attrition is to create a constant supply of human resources and not by paying more money to attract existing talent," said Ramkumar K, head, HR, ICICI Group.

The group employs around 60,000 people currently and spends around Rs 3,000 crore on employee costs each year. The group, including ICICI Bank, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company, ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company, ICICI Securities and other service providers, will require an additional workforce of around 70,000 over the next five years.

The group has signed agreements with various universities and colleges including Delhi University, Utkal University (Bhubaneswar), Kalinga University (Bhubaneswar), Goa University and HR College in Mumbai to bridge the industry-academia gap.

Under the agreements, ICICI officials will not only provide the academic institutions with finance-based courses and curriculum, but also train lecturers to impart knowledge to students. The students have an incentive to intern at one of the companies under the ICICI banner.