18/05/2015
Education in India
Dr Asha Bhandarker
Professor IMI-Delhi
Management schools-like all institutions- operate in a certain context and therefore they have to respond to their context. Being sensitive to their socio, economic and business context, helps management schools to stay relevant. By ignoring their contexts, organizations become increasingly irrelevant and management schools are no exception to this rule. Management schools are faced with many changes and challenges in the business context- the Indian economic scenario, global financial markets, challenges faced by Indian organizations as they expand, grow, go global. Besides this management schools are faced with the quality challenge – providing education of global standards. The need to create new jobs for the large number of graduates being churned out by the Indian higher education system is a potentially explosive challenge faced the country and where management schools can also chip in their own way. The changing expectations of graduates from the workplace* poses another major challenge for both management schools and workplaces which hire them.
Leading HR professionals like Dr Santrupt Misra and Dr Arvind Agarwal had expressed almost a decade ago** that Indian management schools should produce graduates who could ‘hit the ground running’- preparing graduates who could begin to contribute soon after they join the workplace. Good management schools are responding to these challenges, albeit a bit slowly. The following trends are evident in good schools. The major change which seems to be taking place is in the content rather than the form:
1) Moving from a dominant academic focus out of touch with ground reality to bringing in a practice and experience component: Good management schools have been doing this judiciously and selectively rather than indiscriminately. There is a danger in assuming that anyone with some work experience qualifies to teach in a management school. If corporate executives are not drawn from good companies and are not operating at senior levels, then they may perpetuate the same old stale knowledge which is probably irrelevant today. By getting senior level executives, a certain valuable perspective gets built in the students and this stands them in good stead while joining the workplace.
2) Greater efforts to give deeper industry exposure: Although good schools have been providing such exposure for some time, the intensity is changing. Good schools are providing exposure in using live trading platforms for finance students; internships in the hr departments for those with HR specialization and so on.
3) Greater focus on IR rather than just HR: This is a new move and is especially relevant to HR students. The Manesar experience has been a wake-up call for management schools, especially those with HR students. The realization that HR is not merely about working in ac environments in MNCs has hit hard. Hence good schools are reworking their syllabi to renew the thrust on industrial relations.
4) Greater thrust on gender diversity: Some good schools have consciously embarked on increasing the proportion of women students in their management programs. This is an excellent move to bring diversity into the workplace- a theme which has been taken up by the corporate sector and reported extensively in business newspapers last year. This move is likely to pave the way for more gender diverse workplaces within a decade.
5) Focus on all round development: This theme is gaining greater ground in good schools with more emphasis being laid on holistic rather than lopsided development. This approach gives equal importance to in-class and off- class learning and activities.
6) Focus on entrepreneurship development: More good schools are getting into this space developing incubation centers and encouraging their students explore entrepreneurship.
Top schools need to now train their attention to providing deeper skills in crisis management, disaster management, negotiation as well as diversity management. This becomes imperative in the context of globalization as well as in the volatile socio-political and business environments in which we live.
