A good risk manager would be able to recognize and examine the business environment, assess the risks the business is exposed to, design and define risk mitigation strategy to ensure that the organization is able to meet its business objectives.
In today's time when there is so much uncertainty attached to businesses around the globe, companies are focusing on building a robust risk management practice. The job of a risk manager can make you sail you through these choppy times towards a stable shore. Effective Risk Management aid the organizations to make efficient and effective decisions. It enables them to make risk-intelligent decisions through smarter risk management programs that further help them to improve business performance and lead to better outcomes. In the current market scenario, there exists an incredibly high and increasing demand - supply gap in this domain. Owing to their great demand, with a specialized risk management qualification in hand, large consulting and risk consulting organizations like Accenture, EY, KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, Protiviti, Grant Thornton, etc. and large corporate houses will look forward to recruit this talent immediately.
A quick market overview
- The Risk advisory services globally alone has a market size of $10 BN +, growing at an extremely fast rate of approx 40 - 45% YOY.
- Top 250 companies spend around USD 30-50 mn each on risk-related activities the world over.
The figures clearly represent that Risk Management as a career option has a bright future for aspiring professionals. It is clearly one of its kind programme in India which provides an edge to trained Risk Management professionals over other professionals in this space.
Why a risk manager?
One may well ask that if a company has Financial Advisors, what role would a Risk Manager play? A Risk Manager has a way larger role as compared to a Financial Advisor, who renders financial advice to clients, identifying the best investment portfolios for the client, to ensure they get the best returns on their investment. A good risk manager would be able to recognize and examine the business environment, assess the risks the business is exposed to, design and define risk mitigation strategy to ensure that the organization is able to meet its business objectives.
The Risk Manager, manages all type of risks like strategic, operational, compliance, regulatory and financial risk for an organization / client.
Some of the key skill sets a successful risk manager is equipped with are -
- In depth knowledge of business value chain - ability to understand and identify improvement opportunities to drive efficiencies across business processes
- Enterprise Risk Management - understand and analyze risk, velocity of risk etc. at an enterprise level
- Analyze and interpret Big Data - ability to analyze data across business value chains like procurement, manufacturing, finance etc. All these analysis are used as critical inputs by management for taking key strategic decisions.
- Managing Cyber Risk - ability to design controls to avoid cyber attack in the day and age of rapidly growing online businesses
- Managing Technology risk - to ensure confidentiality and integrity of critical business information
- Regulatory and Compliance Risk - with rapid growth and multi-geography operations, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements across locations
Some of the key roles of a Risk Manager are:
- Developing Risk Library of all risks, an organization is exposed to - strategic, operational, regulatory, compliance and financial
- Design robust control frameworks to avoid business breakdowns, pilferage, inefficiencies etc.
- Supporting management in taking risk-intelligent decisions to ensure business value maximization
- Conduct periodic reviews to ensure all processes like manufacturing, procurement, finance, human resources, payroll, sales and marketing etc. are working as desired
Career prospects for students armed with Risk Management degree
In a critical role of ensuring business value maximization along with compliance to organization and regulatory policies, Risk Managers are needed in every organization. So, with a specialized risk management qualification in hand, large consulting and risk consulting organizations like Accenture, EY, KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, Protiviti, Grant Thornton, etc. and other large corporate organizations like General Electric (GE), Tata Group, PepsiCo etc. will now get an opportunity to induct trained students in their organizations at a much earlier stage.
Talking about the current scenario, a lot of time is being spent by companies to train risk management concepts to the resources hired - leading to lower productivity for the organization in the initial phase of employee career.
Thus, a talent pool of professionals trained on a world class Risk Management curriculum will lead to higher productivity for all - small, medium and large corporates. What's also been called out is that professionals with specialized education in Risk Management are believed to have faster career tracks, as compared to their peers who join with more generic qualifications.
Additionally, a Risk Manger given the intense training in his discipline can operate in all the environments that a Financial Advisor can operate in.
The vast range of career options for a Risk Manager across industries / functions are:
- Industry opportunities: Services, Manufacturing, Insurance, Banking, Retail, Healthcare, Consulting, Entrepreneurship
- Corporate governance function of an organization
- Controllership/ Audit department of any organization
- Corporate Finance function
Pay Scale
Students with specialization in Risk Management may earn an attractive salary starting from an initial band of INR 6-8 Lac per annum.
What is the eligibility criterion?
All graduates from commerce, economics, statistics, arts, engineering and others can apply for this specialized post graduation option.
So we can conclude with the fact that Risk Management teaches you the discipline of handling a tough situation in business by managing Strategic, Operational, Regulatory, Compliance and Financial risk of an organization. Risk Management is required across all industries - manufacturing, retail, telecommunication, hospitality, service etc. beyond just financial and regulatory risk mitigation.
The importance of risk management in a firm can never be understated and indeed it is a crucial task to be done, so that a company can define and strategize its future goals by considering and managing as many risk factors it can forecast so that it stays on course for meeting its goals.
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