TEAM PROFILE

A postgraduate in Marketing Management from Bajaj Institute, Nirupama has spent ten successful years in the IT education and training industry. Of these, eight were at NIIT where she concluded her stint as Business Manager. This was followed by a year at SQL Star International as Regional Manager.

In these years she played a range of roles as she grew rapidly. She has worked intensively in training in soft skills and career guidance for students. As placement in-charge, her interaction with the corporate world helped her develop effective training modules for students and staff. These emphasized the critical requirements of the IT industry. Her contribution in this area helped over seven hundred students to get placed. She also looked after recruitment and training to build and strengthen her own team.

Moving on to franchise operations as Business Manager, she was responsible for business and operations for 10 centres, a team size of 80 – 100 people. She developed and implemented training modules for the business partners and their staff. She was acutely aware of the need of customer relationship management to manage the business partners. In this phase of her career she focused on training her team in the area of customer orientation and care. Recruitment was in integral part of her profile. Her support was instrumental in running their business successfully. She left NIIT at this high point to take up larger responsibility. She joined SQL Star International, heading regional operations in Pune. Here she was responsible for two profit centers, handling a team of 40 people. Her responsibilities included planning & budgeting, recruitment & training, branch account management, franchisee management, HR and administration.

A year later she moved to found FiTA (The Final Touch Academy)

At FiTA she has packaged all her experience in the abovementioned symbiotic functions to develop corporate training modules.

These modules are based on real world experience. They focus on providing the participants with the skills that are mandatory for survival and success in the industry. The interactive sessions encourage them to identify their problem areas and find solutions to the same. Sufficient mock sessions replicate real-life experience.

She has herself trained over a 5000 corporate professionals through FiTA’s own OPEN NOMINATION WORKSHOPS and in house training for organizations.

• Nirupama was awarded the prestigious Chevening scholarship (2006) in leadership and management. This is fully sponsored by the foreign and commonwealth off ice the UK government. She was the only entrepreneur selected across India. In the course of the scholarship she did her project on measuring the impact of training on the employees. This yielded very valuable inputs because of her interaction with the senior management in organizations like EDS, Lucent Technologies, British Council, University of Bradford.

• She was on the recruitment panel of Siemens Information Systems Ltd.

• She is visiting faculty for the MBA – HR program at Institute for Business Studies and Research, Inst. for Technology and Management ( ITM- Kharghar & Sion) lecturing on Leadership & Communication.

• She regularly contributes to publications like Hindustan Times, Times Of India (Education times, Economic Times, Ascent). She has also had articles published in Computers today, Mid-Day and on web sites like Zip ahead.com

• She has trained over two thousand graduates (management, hotel management, engineering & education) in areas like communication skills, personality development and interview handling skills from institutions like D.Y.Patil ( Hotel Mgmt), Bharti Vidyapeeth (Hotel Mgmt) , Terna Engg.College, Akbar Peerbhoy College of Education, Inst. For Technology and Management, IBSAR.

Quality has been a critical issue throughout for her at NIIT and SQL Star, both ISO9001 certified organizations-highly systems and quality oriented organizations. The focus was on continuous improvement of systems to achieve zero defect performance

She strongly believes that high quality in service delivery is a great contributor to business expansion in the service industry.

Her consolidated experience in the IT service industry coupled with focus on customer care and relationship management makes hers a suitable profile for training professionals in the relevant areas, having already trained over 1000 professionals.

Nirupama’s emphasis has been on quality and development of skills for long- term benefits.

She believes in long-term associations.