Does an MBA Degree Guarantee a Job in India?
The rate at which students are opting for a full time MBA is booming, and booming at a sheer pace. This flooding rise in the no. of MBA aspirants has raised serious challenges regarding quality of management talent pool in terms of industry readiness.
To meet these increasing demands by MBA aspirants, the quantum of management institutions in the country have been on an upsurge exhibiting exponential growth patterns in the last decade. But not all of these institutes are able to deliver quality and industry oriented education. This poses serious questions on the employability of the management talent in India. We will look at the most crucial factors which are affecting quality of management education.
Curriculum of top notch colleges like IIMs are frequently updated to meet the dynamic changes in the industry. Not many B-schools are able to do this at pace which the industry demands. A crucial factor to consider here is if the institution is an autonomous body or affiliated to any university. It becomes difficult for university-affiliated colleges to update their syllabus very frequently as it requires grants at the university level. Hence the curriculum of the courses (PGDM) at autonomous institutions like IIMs are frequently updated.
Faculties of most of the tier-3 colleges do not have industry experience. They are employed as academicians’ right after their post-graduation or doctorates which makes their pedagogy very academics oriented.
Students need to develop industry skills apart from management fundamentals and business concepts usually found in books. This inculcation of industry skills into the b school students calls for innovative and more dynamic pedagogy like role playing, case studies, case presentations etc. The content and topic selection of these cases have to be in accordance to the latest industry trends.
Communication Skills need special attention to enable b school student for applying their learnings in the industry. Stringent selection process standards of most of the premier B-schools automatically filter out student with average and below average communication skills.
Whereas this is not the case with the rest of the B schools. They need to make sure that the selected students are well versed with English grammar, business writing and verbal skills. This calls for special courses for communication development into the syllabus which most of these colleges lack.
Alumni Base and Industry Networks are the key to produce meaningful placements for students. Most of the top MBA colleges have made huge investments in building their alumni networking platforms. These investments fetch significant leads for placements and industry networking.
These alumni networking platforms are maintained with utmost attention to nurture the love of alumni towards their alma mater. This practice has now been rapidly adopted by tier-2 B-schools as well.
To sum up, the quality of education provided by management schools in India is highly skewed towards top 15-20 B-schools. These schools produce a major chunk of employable and truly industry-ready students. It is a constant struggle at varied levels for rest of the B-schools to keep pace with industry which reduces the average employability of MBA graduates in India.
Jitu is Co-Founder of Mantras2Success. He has Engineering & MBA degrees to his name, along with 10+ years of corporate work experience in fortune 500 companies. Jitu is passionate about improving the careers of the modern day professional. He would be reading books or watching documentaries if not fulfilling his dreams at Mantras2Success.