Date:23/06/2006 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2006/06/23/stories/2006062301840500.htm

Back Retailers body plans skill courses, franchises at 10 cities

Ajita Shashidhar

To provide skills to handle entry-level and middle-management jobs

Mumbai , June 22

With the modern retail sector likely to add close to 100 million sq ft of space in the next five years, industry experts feel that the demand for trained manpower would be close to four lakh people. And it is a known fact that getting trained manpower is a major concern for the industry.

Keeping this growing need in mind, the Retailers Association of India (RAI) has announced a series of retail management courses that are meant to equip manpower with skills to handle frontline jobs at the entry level as well as various middle-management positions.

Mr Gibson Vedamani, CEO, RAI, said that the association would be shortly launching a 100-hour course called Professional Retailing Skills, which would be meant for training entry-level frontline staff.

Mr Vedamani said that RAI is planning to franchise this course across 10 cities. "The course content would be given by RAI and we are looking at franchising it out to training organisations and educational institutions. RAI would also take care of the internship and placement of the students."

The minimum eligibility for this course would be 10+2 and the course would focus on personality development, retail selling skills, customer service, visual merchandising, in-store communication and so on.

Other programmes

The association has recently launched an online programme, Instituteofretailmanagement.com, which is also targeted at training the frontline staff. "Eighty per cent of the manpower need is at the frontline level and there is a big gap in skills at this level," said Mr Vedamani.

Apart from these courses, RAI is also looking at various functional courses. It has tied up Mudra Institute of Communications to launch a course on visual merchandising and creative communication.

This would be a full-time post-graduate diploma course that would span over a period of six months.

Also on cards is a Bachelor of Business Management in Retail course.

This, according to Mr Vedamani, would be a distance education course, for which the association plans to tie-up with one university in each state.

He said that the association is also in talks with the National Retail Federation in the US to introduce international best practices in the courses that the RAI plans to introduce.