The Hindu Business Line : Public sector banks to face ‘huge’ skills gap post ’09

Coimbatore, Nov. 18 “The skills gap in public sector banks is going to be ‘huge’ post 2009, when a good number of senior officers retire. Nothing has been done yet to address this issue,” the Executive Director of Indian Overseas Bank, Mr G. Narayanan, has said.

Sharing his thoughts with Business Line, he said “Succession planning is not easy in public sector banks (PSBs) as in private banks. While it is necessary for a smooth transition, we have not even started addressing the issue of skills gap from 2009 onwards. Time is running out and banks are too tied down to a whole lot of other issues to even consider skills gap seriously,” he said.

IOB is now in the process of training its manpower. “We are trying to outsource this training to bring the marketing culture. We need people who can look beyond traditional products,” he said.

Headcount

Are you short staffed? “Not exactly. We are unable to redeploy our staff more productively as some of the private banks do. Training is essential and we are looking at it seriously,” he said.

The bank has recently recruited 1,000 candidates. It is looking to hire some more from B-schools with specialisation in treasury and risk management, investment banking and so on.

“But we fail to attract the creamy layer of talent pool, because our package is not attractive enough for the top B-school graduates to consider a job in a PSB. The result — we get people, but have to strive hard to train them,” Mr Narayanan said.

On credit offtake, Mr Narayanan said “It is good. We have been registering a 30-35 per cent growth year-on-year.”

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