The India Skills Gap Report 2022 identified MBA graduates as a highly employable majority and pegs the employability of MBA students at 55 percent. Similarly, the World Economic Forum in their Executive Opinion Survey 2020 mentions the supply of business-relevant skills in India as 42 percent. Similar findings of employability have appeared in many reports including the one by McKinsey.
How can the employability of business students be enhanced? By making some policies and practicing attempts to address the issues? These questions have been floating around and have been part of popular coffee table discussions and serious debates by academics and students.
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It appears that some answers may be lurking around us. Looking at the past, we all have heard stories of great teachers like Dronacharya who apart from instructing young princes in the art of warfare could command an entire army in a real war. Students from his academy were known to be one of the best in their respective areas.Or the stories of Panchatantra, where young princes not interested in studying learned great wisdom through stories – an innovation in course delivery like our case studies. Coming back to present India, education sector dynamics are being shaped by the National Education Policy 2020. The policy mentions focussing onemployability potential for students of higher education institutesby engaging with the practical side of learning. This calls for matching students’ learning outcomes with industry needs.
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Harvard’s study Rethinking the MBA mentions that recruiters have been questioning traditional business education and looking for additional skills and traits in students. This is only possible if business schools and industry actively remain connected with each other. Who is going to make this match and bridge the often heard ‘industry academia’ gap? Of course, the faculty of the institutes will be playing a very important role. On one hand, the curriculum and delivery must be designed well enough to match the industry needs and latch onto current trends. In applied subjects like management education, faculty who are connected with the industry or industry issues through their consulting or research may be able to better mentor students to be industry-ready.One of the ways this connectedness can be improved is through cutting-edge research and consulting assignments which benefit the industry and also flow into the classroom.
As a faculty member of IMI Kolkata, a lot of peer learning takes place from other faculty colleagues educated from premier institutes who are deeply involved in research and consulting projects with the industry, government, and multilateral agencies. Such interdisciplinary industry-linked studies, apart from meeting policy objectives, areoften used in the classroom as well as for connecting with the industry through invited talks, engagements, and live projects where the industry along with the faculty acts as a mentor for students.
Connecting the learning outcome to success in placements is often a great but exciting journey for students. So, the choice of the business school becomes very important. Students have to ask: does the course build in employability skills? Is it relevant to the industry? Does the institute carry out research and consulting projects and engage actively with the industry? Especially in turbulent times, students have to learn new skills to adapt themselves to a changed reality and leverage new opportunities that turbulence like the pandemic often throws up. And those new knowledge and skillsets required may still be half-baked in textbooks. At IMI Kolkata, research, consulting, and training industry executives are an integral part of its learning culture and this keeps the institute on a continuous path of updating its curriculum and delivery to suit recent industry needs, bringing its students closer to emerging trends in the industry, which gets reflected in placements outcomes.