With the introduction of variety of banking products and services due to BASEl standardisation, the need of qualified manpower and skilled people in banking services is all time high creating plenty of opportunities in the sector, says Achal Kumar
India is home to 21 per cent of the world’s unbanked adult (we still have 48 per cent of our adult without a bank account) and while tracing India’s all banking facilities and usage India is far behind the developed group of countries. So even with around 20 Government and 10 non-government banks, we lack in banking facilities and manpower. With introduction of BASEl standards (set of international banking regulations put forth by the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision, which set out the minimum capital requirements of financial institutions with the goal of minimising credit risk), now banks have to re-engineer their operations to match the banking giants of world. With the introduction of variety of banking products and services, the need of qualified manpower and skilling people in banking services is all time high.
With the quality work environment, financial stability, exponential growth and respect as banker, this profession has always attracted youth towards it.
The Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS), a separately constituted body (recruitment company) established by all nationalised bank except State Bank of India to provide eligible and competent manpower to the banks. The IBPS conducts three exams —Combined Written Exam (CWE)- probationary officer (PO), CWE - Clerical and CWE-specialist officer for technical, management, CA and law-based jobs.
At present, they have notified for CWE (PO) 16 for they shall start accepting applications online and exams shall be conducted in three phases— tier-I and tier-II (objective based online tests) and interview. Any graduate (completed a minimum of 10+2+3 years of graduation) within the age bracket of 20-30 can appear for the exam.
Tier-I will contain 100 questions with max duration of one hour with 35 questions each in Maths and Reasoning and 30 questions from English. This will be a qualifying round with sectional cut offs and there will be final overall cut-off for eligibility for tier II.
Tier-II will have five sections of Reasoning (50), General Awareness (40), Quantitative Aptitude (50), English (40) and Computer Knowledge (20) with 200 questions where all question shall carry equal marks.
While marking these sections and finding overall scores, they follow the standardised statistical tool. Where they first normalised the papers and questions and get the weighted scores for all the questions and finally they linearly transform the score to avoid negative scores. Understanding the scoring is very crucial to devise a full proof strategy to qualify the written test.
However, the exam is strictly an aptitude test but still they follow a pattern in type and difficulty level of questions. Projected area from which the entire paper will be framed is mentioned below.
English language syllabus of IBPS PO exam is the first paper of basic English knowledge. It has General English, Comprehension and Spelling sections.
General English: Vocabulary, Synonyms, Antonyms, Word formation and Sentence rearrangement.
Comprehension: Theme detection, Deriving conclusions, Passage completion, Error detection and Passage Correction, Sentence correction spelling: Grammar, Idioms, and Phrases contain IBPS PO Syllabus.
The quantitative aptitude syllabus will try to check your numeric calculations ability as well as problem solving skills. Major topics are —Number system, HCF & lCM, Number series, Problems based on numbers. Approximation Wrong Number, Decimal Fractions, Square root and cube root, Simplifications. Partnerships, Percentage, Ratio, and proportions, Average and Ages Ratio & Proportion, Profit and loss, Simple interest and compound interest, Time and work, Time and Distance, Average duration. Permutation and combination, Data tables, Probability, Pie Charts, Bar Graphs, line Graphs, Mixed graphs, Case study.
The general awareness syllabus covers the latest information about the Current Affairs (latest news), current affairs of last six months, and some static part specially from topics like awards & honors, sports, finance, agriculture, Indian economy, international economy, UNO, marketing, Indian Constitution, history of banking, countries/currencies, books and their authors, banking terms, RBI, fiscal-monetary policies, etc.
The IBPS PO computer syllabus covers basic computer terminology, software and hardware questions, computer abbreviation, data base management system, Microsoft-office, basic knowledge of Internet, etc.
The IBPS PO reasoning syllabus covers all logical reasoning questions. logical reasoning contains verbal and non-verbal category questions. Verbal reasoning means blood relation/sitting arrangement/coding-decoding/making series and syllogism. Non-verbal includes making series/analogy and classification. Questions shall be from Number series, letter and symbol series, statement and argument, logical problems, verbal reasoning, blood relations, coding-decoding, number ranking, Making judgments etc.
(The writer i8s a mentor & counselor for Bank PO exam at Mindworkz)