Can the Employability of fresh MBAs be measured?

Can the Employability of MBAs of a Business School be Measured?

Should the employability of a fresh MBA/PGDM be only measured by these graduates being placed in a company? This number, often measured by the percentage of MBAs/PGDMs placed, represents only the quantity but not the QUALITY of Employability. For Quality, a metric I call 'Modal CTC (cost-to-company) to CGPA Ratio' (mCCR) can be used. To calculate this, find the ratio of CTC monetary value to the CGPA value of top 10 to 20 performers (in terms of their CGPA). Then find out the modal value of all these ratios which will be an indicator of how the academic performance of your MBAs is evaluated by recruiters in terms of their 'employment monetary value'. Though I have not done any market research on this, but simply by the word-of-mouth generated statistics, for the majority of business schools in India, an mCCR of Rupees 100,000 to 200,000 per unit CGPA will be considered medium Employability Quality. mCCR value below this will be considered Low Employability Quality, and above this as High Employability Quality.

Low Employability Quality could be because of many factors, but most common factors causing Low Employability Quality are: (i) curriculum not aligned with business/industry needs; (ii) specialisation courses not skill-focused, and (iii) poor industry-faculty linkage (either through executive training programmes, collaborative research/case writing, or consulting). Setting up a good Quality Assurance System at your business school which monitors Employability Quality and enforces corrective action can improve it significantly within a short period of two to three years. 

Seeding Employability in Fresh MBA/PGDM Graduates

Employability issues are emerging at the very core of contemporary business education not merely in India but in the western world as well. According to 2012 Employability Survey by MeritTrac Services, 89% of graduating MBAs/PGDMs in India are not employable. Employability becomes even a more  critical issue because of the fact  that a majority of these MBA students hav(e no work experience.

We have been trying to meet this challenge by following what we call as the 3C's of MBA education. This 3C model has been created on the assumption that an MBA program must produce a graduate with practicing manager competencies, whereas at the undergraduate (e.g. BBA) level the graduate could be a person knowing management practices and theories but not skilled in them.

The practice-level managerial skills are embedded by following the 3C's in our PGDM (MBA) program. These 3 C's stand for 3 mantras: (i) cross-functional, (ii) collaborative, and (iii) competence-based. Cross-functionality ensures learning the same concept through 'multiple domain lenses' at the same time and ensure elimination of functional silos of business knowledge. Obviously management is neither an addition of functional silos like marketing, operations and strategy nor a combo of various thoughts. For instance, 'service' means same in service operations, services marketing and service innovation. But taught through three different subject-matter silos, students have three different concepts of the same management concept.

The second C stands for 'collaborative with industry' which stresses focus on management theories in the context of management practices facilitated through collaboration with industry primarily through Internship, but also through Team Projects, Independent Study projects or through Dissertation projiects. The practice-based learning comes through the interaction between Maanagers and Students facilitated through Professors. This creates a WIN -- WIN -- WIN relationship through collaboration between theories, practices and their integrated learning.

The third C stands for 'competence-based', which means all learning is 'skill-focused practice-oriented' aligned with industry needs. This is accomplished by adopting the Outcome-Based Education (OBE) model holistically in teaching and assessment. Thus all specialisation-based teaching is focused in acquiring practice-oriented skills which are in high demand in the industry.

The model has started paying dividends in terms of improvement in both the recruiters' as well as recruitment quality both for internship as well as final placement.

KBC Saxena