ICICI Academy for Skills, that offers vocational training programmes, free of cost, to youth from the economically-weaker sections, announced the launch of its centre in Chennai on Tuesday.
Three courses — selling skills, office administration and web designing — for those who have completed graduation are now being offered at the Chennai centre located in Ambattur.
The Academy, started by ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, a corporate social responsibility initiative of the ICICI group, will also help trained youth find employment, through an online job portal.
On Tuesday, ICICI Bank executive director, N.S. Kannan, said that after setting up its first centre in Jaipur last month, the Academy was setting up centres in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune this week.
Other locations where such centres had been planned were Coimbatore, Sangli, Patna and Guwahati. A total of 125 candidates joined the three courses in Chennai.
Of the six courses offered by the Academy, three were for graduates, while for the other three — electrical and home appliance repair, refrigeration and airconditioning repair, and motor and pump repair — the minimum qualification was a class X pass.
The duration of the courses is 8-12 weeks. Besides offering the training free of cost, the Academy provided uniforms, meals and course materials to the students, a press release said.
The Academy, Mr. Kannan said, was looking to train 5,000 youths at nine training centres in the first year of operation.
On a cumulative basis, by 2016, it aimed to train 15,000 youth across the country. The ICICI Foundation had tied up with several partners for generating the content of the courses and would create an online job portal for the trained youth.
