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