In the current scenario, the role of corporate social responsibility is enforced even by many governments and hence, the need of the hour calls out to CSR professionals. To cater to this growing need, International Institute of Corporate Social Responsibility (IICSR) has surfaced by providing education in the field.
Where professionals in all fields are being skilled under the umbrella of many prestigious institutions, IICSR strives to skill up India in a not-so-common field with a CSR education eco-system. The founding entrepreneur of the venture, Harsha Mukherjee currently sits as the Managing Director of the institute and has curated India’s first Masters in Business Administration (MBA) in CSR for MIT WPU, Pune.
The MD says:
We are committed to contribute towards social and economic development of the country and we are sure to achieve our vision to create a pool of trained CSR professionals and bring a sustainable transformation in the employment landscape across the country.
She bids that along the course of time, companies across the country have scaled up their efforts especially after coming in the ambit of mandatory CSR initiatives under Companies Act amended in 2014. With many more than 8000 companies coming in this range, and each looking for the best of CSR professionals, the spending over these has risen by a jaw-dropping 28% in the last financial year. She says:
For many corporate, this strategic shift is difficult and is compounded by the scarcity of CSR talent to create scalable long-term strategy and implement it. While several thousand jobs have been created because of this amendment, several CSR jobs at all levels lie vacant. There is a towering gap for CSR professionals with a burgeoning number of over 2,00,000 workforce. In these testing times looking at the future prospects a career in CSR would be the most rewarding and sought after
The companies demanding highly for CSR specialists come from large and mid-sized private and public sector ranging right from FMCG, BFSI and Real Estate to Pharmaceuticals and Media. The hunting goes at different levels from middle to senior levels, including Heads with salaries from 18 lakh to over one crore annually.
Given the nature of the field, CSR credits itself with the ability to potentially address the socio-economic and political inequalities and becomes even more effective with the CSR education ecosystem when worked upon as a development tool. IICSR has hence, developed and established an institutional framework to create a new breed of trained CSR professionals so as to enhance, and enable enterprise competitiveness in a market-driven environment.
As the field is a newly emerging form of management for both corporate and academics, it is expected to grow enormously in the near future and institutes like IICSR are now ensuring proper skilling up of the professionals who are going to lay the foundation of this new genre of management.