TKWs Institute of Banking & Finance

Mr Amit Goyal is the Founding Director at TKWs Institute of Banking & Finance. A globally renowned experiential learning expert for the past 20 years, he is a serial entrepreneur with experience of multiple business ventures. He is recognised amongst 100 Top BFSI Leaders of India and has been instrumental in creating “BFSI Vision 2022” and “BFSI Roadmap of India” which were presented to PMO, MoF & RBI and were applauded by Dr Raghuram Rajan then the governor of RBI. Read his views here what he has to say about his institute and education sector.

What makes the education sector the best sector to work in?

“There is a continuous shift towards building a society of knowledge workers” 

I have worked towards seeking knowledge. My view is that the world has moved from an industrial society to a knowledge society today. And all those who are aspiring to get jobs to want to work in a knowledge economy. Many years ago, Lord Krishna had taught us that knowledge is something that grows by sharing. As an entrepreneur, I continuously aim to keep building my knowledge, and for that, I also need to share my knowledge. The Education Sector allows me to share my knowledge. So this goes with our core philosophy of Knowledge acquisition, Knowledge sharing, and leverage.

When heading an Educational Institute, it is very important to have a dynamic approach towards both student and faculty development. What are your strategies for the same?

“The dynamic approach has become an eminent aspect for every organization”

We live in a VUCA World today with so much volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity around us; we cannot approach our work with a static measure. In March, we were expecting things to get normal after a 21 days lockdown, and now we are unsure whether physical education will start soon. At TKWsIBF, we use a dynamic approach and train our students and staff to remain engaged. 

Thus, we tell everyone not to resist change, embrace the changes happening, and accept the way new way of doing things. When lockdown happened, we created a video to address our students and tell them what they should do immediately. We also helped every student by designing ideal day schedules for them. We thought about how students should deal with their stress and conducted workshops for parents to support their children and vice-versa. Thus, we quickly strategized and were able to adapt with changes happening around us.

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Recently National Educational Policy (NEP) has laid out a grand vision about what education in India should be like over the next 50 years. What are your thoughts on the same?

“A pivotal aspect of NEP is the multidisciplinary education and focus on attaining skills” 

I think the most beautiful thing about this New Educational Policy is dual qualifications, cross disciplinary credits and vocationalization at the same time. Since 2012, Tkws Institute of Banking & Finance has been endorsing triple qualification at graduate level. We have always said that just doing B.Com alone is not enough. It gives you an academic understanding, but students need to learn professional education, vocational skills and gather industry licenses. Through NEP, the Government has encouraged multidisciplinary education and also allowed dual degrees. We are happy that our triple qualification will be now available to the students across the country. 

Do you think Co-curricular activities go hand in hand with Academics for the holistic development of students?

“Students learn from planning, strategizing and executing through curricular activities” 

In the TKWs Institute of Banking and Finance, co-curricular activities are mandatory for every student. Every organization wants to hire street smart people. Hence, as one of our course activities, every student has to participate in organizing a party; we call it Booming Freshto. From that activity, we debrief their experiential learning, and teach them planning and management. Students also organize events for their seniors like convocation, sports day. So students are not only participating, but they are also organizing co-curricular activities, which are mandatory; they learn planning from it, and we give them credits. 

“Relationships are core to TKWs Institute of Banking & Finance.Every student of TKWsIBF is a Brand Ambassador for us. It is about lifelong relationships that we nurture here.” 

Do you have a dedicated placement cell available at your college? If yes, then what are the major roles performed by the cell?

“The interactions with multiple industry experts help our students in the hiring process”

We don’t believe in a placement cell. We call it a Corporate Relations Department. Our philosophy that students are not our customer, rather a product. Our real customer is the industry. We groom our students like our kids, and our job is to sell them to the industry for best possible a.k.a best possible placement which a student deserves. So our Corporate Relations Department’s job is to build excellent customer relationships with Industry and put every student in best possible role. The Corporate Relations Department comprises the experts from the Institute as well as students and Alumni. We create events like Banker’s Meet, ASEAN Banking tour where we deepen our relations with the industry, and from all of this, we showcase the talent of our students. Our students get hired during interaction processes; we do have a formal placement process for the students, and so far, we are glad to place every student in the industry. 

The education sector is gradually moving towards the digital age. What measures TKWs is taking to prepare the students for the same?

“The pandemic gave us an opportunity to grow and expand”

Corona has completely changed our entire outlook. Till now, we had a limitation. We were taking only 120 students in a year. Now we have understood that experiential learning can be done so well through live virtual classes. We have identified that live virtual classes are so much better than digital courses. Both our flagship courses, Advance Diploma in Banking & Finance and Post Graduate Diploma in Banking & Finance, can be joined from anywhere in India through live virtual mode. Students joining us from outside Delhi, if they do not want to come down to Delhi to attend physical classrooms, can continue to do it not only during this corona pandemic but forever. We have already started offering classes through physical classroom mode and live virtual classroom mode.

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What according to you is the meaning of failure? And, how do you motivate a student to overcome this feeling?

“At TKWs we learn in a step by step process where mistakes are a part of process”

Everyone who joins TKWsIBF gets a card at the beginning that says mistakes are a sign that you are learning. As I say, TKWsIBF is about experiential learning. Experience is the teacher, which gives punishment first and lesson afterward. Whole learning at TKWsIBF is about making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. So when a student goes for a leadership camp, we put them in difficult situations, allow them to make mistakes and then discuss what they learnt from it. We celebrate mistakes, we encourage errors, and then we draw out learning from them.