BFSI sector set to offer 1.6 million jobs: study – The Hindu

Scope for reskilling opportunities

The merger of 10 public sector banks to create four large banks would reduce employment opportunities in such institutions in the future, but the overall BFSI sector will offer over a million new jobs in the next three years, according banking and finance training academy BankEdge.“Every year, over 30 lakh students write multiple bank recruitment examinations but only 0.5% of the candidates manage to succeed. Now that the PSU banks are merging, there would be lower employment opportunities in the years to come,” said Santosh Joshi, founder & CEO, BankEdge.

He, however, said private sector banks would continue to hire and the entire BFSI sector still offers plenty of employment and reskilling opportunities.

“India’s share of global GDP in dollar terms is set to increase from 2% in 2009 to 13% in 2050. This makes it the most rapidly growing economies over this time period. So, the BFSI sector in India will need an additional 1.6 million skilled workforce by 2022 as per estimates by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC),” Mr. Joshi said.

He said while more than 50% of the jobs would need reskilling due to change in technology, 15 to 20% of the jobs would be new roles in nature.

The emerging new roles include trade finance specialists, wealth management experts, credit & risk analysts, cyber security and credit analyst, blockchain architects and robot programmers.

Some jobs will be made redundant as technology takes over.

“The jobs that will disappear and will be drastically reduced are of data entry, data verification operators, teller and underwriters. Several jobs that require reskilling include loan officers, sales executives, customer associates and IT specialists,” said Ravi Dighe, president and executive director, BankEdge.

Currently there are 27 PSU banks which will be reduced to 12 banks and there are 21 private sector banks, 49 foreign banks, 56 regional rural banks, 1562 urban cooperative banks, thousands of rural cooperative banks and non banking finance companies (NBFCs) which will expand in the coming years needing quality staff. Besides this there are several payments and small finance banks that would need more employees.

Though most of the recruitment currently happens through campus hiring, placement consultants and job portals, it results to high attrition in the entry levels because the candidates lack the desired training before joining.

“This leads to low productivity and high HR and sourcing costs. Thus academies like us come up with tailored made programmes in close coordination with the banks and the financial institutions to supply trained personnel after imparting short term training. And this has proved beneficial for the BFSI sector,” Mr. Dighe said.