There are over 4000+ AICTE recognised B-Schools in India. There are innumerable challenges ahead of B-Schools in attracting quality students, faculty members and in the process transforming our students into professional managers of tomorrow.
The big concern for B-Schools is in imparting Quality education through continuous improvement in management curriculum, adopting innovative pedagogy and teaching tools such as Innovation labs, Simulation and Management games. Few challenges before B-Schools in India can be addressed by upgrading the infrastructure, innovative pedagogy and curriculum, and an effective industry academia collaboration.
To ensure quality Management Education, B-Schools have to upgrade their Infrastructure such as Classrooms, Computer labs and libraries. Libraries should possess required quantity and quality of books with the Electronic databases. MBA curriculum needs to be updated every two years to ensure the quality management education and in turn make our students employable. Curriculum needs to address the present needs of the industry and enhance the competency level of the students to meet the challenges of the ever changing business environment.
It is imperative for Business Schools attract and retain best of the faculty members with healthy blend of both academically qualified and corporate practitioners. To attract and retain experienced faculty members, the B-Schools need to offer salaries and other benefits on par with the reputed B-Schools. Business Schools need to provide amp full opportunities for faculty members for conducting Management Development Programs and Consulting assignments with the industry.
Aspiring students while selecting the Business Schools use the ranking of B-Schools as one of the criteria. Ranking of B-Schools by various magazines and agencies have become increasingly popular among the stakeholders and hence B-Schools have to upgrade their capacities and enhance their performance to get competitive ranking. According to recent studies, the employability level of our MBA graduates is very low in India posing major challenges to the B-Schools in imparting best of the knowledge, skills, attitude, and soft skills to students to make them job ready. It is high time for the B-Schools to collaborate with the Industry and involve Industry practitioners in Admission, Curriculum Development, Teaching, obtaining Projects, Summer Placement and Final placement for the students.
In addition to the above, in order to impart quality management education B-schools need to engage in business research, training and consulting activities to deliver their best to academia and industry.
Today, the major problem with many B-Schools is the outdated Syllabus and pedagogy. Most of the Business Schools follow University Syllabus which is being revised once in four years. This poses major challenges in terms of equipping students with the latest trends in Management which are expected out of each student. Most often the pedagogy used in many B-Schools is mainly lecture mode with the more emphasis laid on the end-semester examinations. Here the weight age given to end-semester examination is 70 percent. Hence the entire Business School education revolves around preparing students for getting higher marks in their end-semester examination.
Today, the most important requirement is to impart skills which are essential for the students is to build a successful corporate career. When you talk about competency of a student it involves Knowledge, Skills, Attitude, and Behaviour. Whereas the present management education is focusing on imparting knowledge to the students by totally ignoring the skills and attitude part of competency. This in turn makes our students lacking in required skills and attitude to effectively handle the corporate challenges.
In the case of many Business Schools the corporate interaction is limited to seeking Summer Internships and Final Placement for their students. It is imperative to involve Industry practitioners in the Input, Process, and Output phases of successfully transforming the aspiring students to corporate professionals. Hence it is important to involve Industry practitioners during Admission process, Curriculum Development, Guest Lectures, Projects, Summer Internships, and Final placements. This will enable the Business Schools in realigning their admission process, curriculum development, classroom teaching , Projects, Summer Internship, and Final Placement activities so as to meet up to the industry expectations and bridge the gap between Industry and academia.
The above initiatives will definitely help B-Schools in enhancing the quality of Management Education and make our MBA graduates job ready. What is required today is to have a regular industry-academia interaction resulting in quality management education. This is going to be a continuous process where B-Schools have to adapt to the fast changing business environment.
Dr. R. Satish Kumar
Presently Dr. R. Satish Kumar is working as the Professor-Marketing & Dean: Research & International Relations in IFIM BusinessSchool. He has over twenty four years of experience in Industry and Academics. Dr. Kumar has served at senior level positions in companies such as NIIT Ltd, Radiant Software Ltd and Firepro Systems Pvt. Ltd (A Panasonic Group Company) and also taught at TAPMI Manipal, Alliance University Bangalore and IIM Bangalore. He has published over 20 Research Papers.
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