After a massive hiring spree, banks focus on staff trainin

KATHMANDU, DEC 21 -

After carrying out a massive recruitment drive in the last couple of years, commercial banks are now concentrating on training and development of their staff.

Most of the banks’ human resource (HR) managers are busy developing new training programmes and executing them.  With relatively new employees in place, training them makes sense as it would help reduce the possible operational risk posed by the less experienced workforce.

“Over the last couple of years, we have spent millions and introduced a wide range of training programmes—both in-house and outsourced—at various levels,” said Amit Sharma, manager-human resource at Laxmi Bank. “We also have exclusive ties with business schools like Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad and international training institutions like Omega Performance.”

Last two years also saw banks’ access to training and development programmes increase, with the establishment of the National Banking Training Institute (NBTI). NBTI is a banking and finance academy established under the aegis of Nepal Bankers’ Association, Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) and Rural Micro Finance Development Centre with Asian Development Bank’s support.

Commercial banks’ HR heads agree that NBTI has been instrumental in meeting their training and development needs. According to them, NBTI has been providing structured training programmes in various functional areas of banking. “As it specialises in banking training, NBTI has been our trustworthy partner,” said Jenu Thapa, HR head at Mega Bank Nepal.

Rashmi Kharel Karmacharya, HR manager at Nepal SBI Bank, also echoed Thapa. Apart from in-house and outsourced training and development programmes, the bank also relies on its parent company—State Bank of India—in meeting its staff training needs, said Kharel.

Although HR managers claim they are making serious efforts in implementing training and development programmes in their organisations, critics say their efforts are just in their nascent stages and there is still a lot to be done. “They have definitely realised the importance of training and development, but they still take it as cost rather than investment,” said NBTI CEO Sanjib Subba. “Still, training and development has not been integrated into the mainstream business.”  

Training and development programmes are effective only if they are aligned with the overall business strategy of an organisation. 

Apart from organisations’ attitude towards training and development, the country lacks the dedicated pool of professional trainers. In the absence of local trainers, banks and training institutes have to rely on foreign resource persons which further pushes the cost of training up. NBTI, in a bid to increase the number of local resource person, has introduced a new programme—Train the Trainers.

Source: Kantipur