The country's largest lender, State Bank of India would be giving intensive training to over two lakh employees at several levels in banking technology, e learning and other fields.

The bank has urged its employees to attend a two week training workshop every 18-24 months in order to keep them at pace with the competition prevailing in the market.

"Our major focus is on upgrading the skills of employees in view of the major expansion of workforce in recent years and competitive business environment," Ms Mahpara Ali, Head, Strategic Training Unit (STU) of SBI said. he target for STU is to train at least 1.2 lakh employees a year, she added.

STU is a unified training establishment of SBI which connects over 50 learning centres and four apex training units of SBI situated in different parts of the country.

"The idea is to consolidate entire training process for undertaking skilling and re-skilling of our employees. We will do this through e-learning predominantly," Ms Ali said.

STU has designed the entire technollogy platform for the e learning modules. SBI currently does not focus on training as an independent revenue source. "Our focus is only on staff. However, we have trained staff of other public sector banks and some foreign banks on their request on cost-to-cost basis," the official said.

"All the infrastructure is owned by SBI. We have over 400 full-time faculty in addition to many visiting experts. Training huge staff itself means lot of expenditure," Ms Ali said.