MEG ties-up with experts for vocational courses

Mumbai, Mar 29: Manipal Education Group (MEG) today announced its tie-up with industry experts for giving 'vocational education' to provide skill-based higher education to students for service sectors. MEG will provide short-term skilled vocational courses in areas of Retail, Banking, Telecom, IT Infrastructure, BPO and Media, to provide skilled and trained workers in related sectors, Manipal University Group President Anand Sudarshan here said.

''Through our continuous dialogue with the industry leaders, we are capturing the need for vocational education in a growing market like India,'' he said.

The courses will be offered to six cities - the four metros Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai and Hyderabad and Bangalore to start with and expand to 20 cities within a year. The classes will be conducted online and through video conferencing. The courses are mostly short-term and varies from three months to one year, he said.

We have tied-up with different companies related to the sector not only to provide training for the courses but also for placement opportunities to the students. Citing an example he said ''For Telecom we have tied-up with Bharti Airtel, for banking with ICICI bank and for Information Technology with IBM.'' ''Trained man power gives us the freedom to focus on our core business as against investing time on training people at our branches and back offices. Instead of recruiting freshers and training them we would prefer students trained in their colleges itself,'' ICICI Bank's Group-Chief Human Resource Officer K Ramkumar said.

He said that while jobs had quadrupled in the country, there was a scarcity of quality workers.

''The existence of well-educated and skilled man-power opens up enormous opportunities in terms of moving into higher value-added, knowledge-based, advanced sectors,'' President and CEO of IDFC Private Equity and a stake holder of Manipal Education Miranda Luis said.

UNI