The Hindu Business Line : Two out of five CS students are women

The ICSI (Institute of Company Secretaries of India) is planning to launch e-learning, to make the course accessible to students in remote areas of the country, says Ms Preeti Malhotra, president of the Institute. "We want to implement the project in both asynchronous and synchronous modes. In the synchronous mode, e-learning will enable students have access to excellent faculty in virtual classroom atmosphere. We will also have a 24-hour help-line in place and make it operational in the near future. This will give the students a great value-add in their studies and knowledge," she says.

"We will also expand, accelerate and intensify career counselling for prospective students so that they are able to avail themselves of the lucrative opportunities offered by the company secretary course after they go through the exciting grind the course puts them through," adds Ms Malhotra.

Excerpts from an interview:

What are your immediate priorities for students?

Students are the future of the profession and it is evident that with the way the Indian economy is growing and integrating with the world economy, there will be a sharply increasing demand for company secretaries both in job and in public practice. Therefore, we wish to revise the syllabus to accommodate the demands on the profile of company secretary ten years down the line.

Our future members should be able to exceed the expectations of the various sectors of business, industry and regulators. We at the same time want our syllabus and training to be student-friendly without compromising on the quality so that more and more students are attracted to the course in order to fulfil the growing demands on the number of qualified company secretaries.

We will strengthen our training template to further sharpen the soft skills of our students. This will make them more sophisticated and effective in their work performance.

How do you propose to get the brightest students to go for the CS course?

Actually, the students that join this course, because of the contents and quality of the course, have a brighter career when they pass our examinations and undergo our training.

When better career opportunities and challenging areas of work are available to company secretaries and this aspect is stressed in career counselling programmes, brighter students will automatically feel the urge to pursue this course.

Further, as global integration of the Indian economy grows, company secretarial services will be more in demand. This trend, I believe, can be banked upon to attract bright students to go for this course. With corporate governance and compliance management-related services being provided by company secretaries gaining momentum, brighter students will surely find this profession challenging and promising. The future of this course looks indeed brighter for all those who decide to take on the mantle.

On the knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and legal process outsourcing (LPO) fronts, are company secretaries active?

Although I do not have ready statistics at hand, wherever I have interacted with our members, I have found them active on these fronts, both to get themselves acquainted with American or European regulatory laws, and forms and procedures so as to be able to work in KPO and LPO industries and also to add these to their practising portfolio.

I feel this quite natural for members of this profession because of their legal, compliance and research acumen. Their expertise in corporate and securities laws will carve out a specialist role for the members of the ICSI in the KPO and LPO areas. I feel the future is quite exciting on this front for company secretaries and we are also taking steps to impart capacities on this front to our practising members.

As the first woman to head the Institute, would you wish that more women took up the profession?

Apart from the fact of my having become the president, I think the profession, in particular, and society, in general, that achieves gender neutrality not only for highest positions but also in every aspect of work, makes fast progress.

The percentage of women students pursuing this course has grown steadily, from a meagre figure in the beginning to over 40 per cent in recent times. Students of both genders should join this profession because of the intrinsic challenge and extraordinary career opportunities it opens up for the people with the right attitude and professional approach. Girls can of course ascend to success in the company secretaries profession.

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