Rural graduates 'finish' at corporate offices

The Kendra, a Bangalore based NGO working for rural and tribal development, in association with Vidya Poshak, started a new batch on Saturday with 38 graduate students from many villages around Mysore.

Graduate Finishing School, founded by a team of professionals with decades of experience in corporate and social sector, provides 90-day residential training programme for graduate students from rural areas who have completed their graduation in any field of study in Kannada medium.

This social initiative training programme, started in 2010 in Mysore and having a track record of 100 per cent placement of the first three batches that came out, enables the students from economically backward sections to find careers in corporate companies.

The course material ranges from leadership techniques, communicative and interpersonal skills, presentation skill  and corporate aptitude, is carefully designed by corporate experts to fulfill the specific needs of the industry.

Even the course fee is 25,000 per head for three month training programme, economically backward students whose parent’s annual income is less than ` 60,000 have to pay only ` 15,000. However, Infosys COO Shibulal supports the students with a scholarship of ` 10,000  for each of them.

VGKK also arranges a loan facility of low interest rate with the assistance of ‘Micro Graam’, set up by Social Investor, a Bangalore based financial initiative. After completing the course, the rural students directly go to companies like Infosys, JP Morgan, Mphasis, First American,Wipro and so on.

Venkateshan, Vice President of Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra said that the social initiative programme with an objective of providing an effective training for creating livelihood for the economically disadvantaged student community to secure employment, aims at bridging the gap between academia and competitive job market.