The word "finishing school" has been promoted and supported largely by the body that represents India's IT industry, NASSCOM. The idea is to bridge the gap in skills and enable pass outs from engineering colleges to gather sufficient understanding of how concepts are applied.

However, glaring gaps between the qualification an individual carries and the skills he/she exhibits is a concern that goes far and above the IT sector. As Ravindra Tulsyan, Chairman of the newly formed not-for-profit organisation called Business Process Council (BPC), explained, employees take several months, possibly years to master the right processes involved in their jobs.

"Delays in learning the processes, in today's demanding environment, would result in lower productivity for the organisation," Mr Tulsyan, who is also chairman and chief mentor of Knowerx Education, a Mumbai-based training organisation, said. "This apart, virtually every process today has been standardised and organisations are expected to follow them in order to remain credible and competent."

Aggregating processes

In fact, BPC has been formed with the objective of aggregating processes in various business and non-profit organisations and disseminating the knowledge to the workforce in the sector. Mr Tulsyan said BPC has been inspired by 'American Production and Inventory Control Society' (APICS), an organisation formed in the US in the early 50's with a view to mark up processes involved in production and material management, subjects that remained outside the ambit of management education.

"If you think, production and inventory control are not the intellectually appealing thing academic institutions often like to include as part of their curriculum, and for that reason APICS introduced a training programme, which remains popular to this very day," Mr Tulsyan said. "In fact, a survey in the US indicated that APICS-trained people could earn 20 per cent more than those who weren't trained by them. This has only shown to us that despite being academically not so stimulating, industry respects this particular knowledge." 

The council would use Internet as a platform to gather business processes and would build a repository from which members can learn. Mr Tulsyan said wiki (a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content) is used to deposit and modify process information. Apart from being used as a training material for employees, the document can be directly taken and adopted by companies.

"Of course, this would save them time and effort," Mr Tulsyan said. "(The companies) have been gathering process information through their in-house knowledge management or domain competency groups and they can be spared of that." 

Besides proving handy for employees without experience, he says the process documents, which would be created based on information gathered from all sectors of the industry, would also help those promoted to the higher positions. Though they are conversant with the processes, employees also have problems in adapting to their newer positions and seldom find training to help them. 

BPC would not only focus on creating process documents for segments like airlines, manufacturing, media etc, but would also make some of them country-specific. "Things like transport may have to contain country-specific processes," Mr Tulsyan said. "Because the procedures of transportation differs from each country, as does things like taxation and documentation." 

Inaugurated recently, BPC's primary task is to create the repository of processes and develop courses. The courses will address needs of specific jobs such as accounts executive or sales manager. "These are going to be certification programmes," Mr Tulsyan said. "Employees can consult our repository, write a test and receive the certificate for having successfully qualified to handle the processes of a particular job."

Credibility

The council has roped in respected global bodies to bolster their credibility. Besides APICS, they have American Society of Transportation and Logistics (ASTL, a professional organisation founded in 1946), Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP, a professional association) and Supply Chain Council (SCC, an international, not-for-profit trade association of companies from multiple industries). It was inaugurated at a conference in Mumbai, in which the council also brought in partners such as NITIE (National Institute of Training in Industrial Engineering) and Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture. 

To learn more about BPC and the training initiatives, log on to their website: http://www.bp-council.org/Default2.aspx?aid=1&nid=1