Democratising Education Beyond Boundaries

Disruption has pushed institutions to tear the rule book for the better, creating room for innovation. India is poised to become a $313 billion education and skills market by 2030, as per an Aspire Circle report.

A year full of opportunities
Despite the several changes, MBA and PGDM continue to be the most in-demand and sought-after higher education degrees to move forward in the corporate race. “This has been the finest opportunity for academicians as they have done the unimaginable without compromising on quality,” comments Srinivasan R Iyengar, Director, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies Mumbai.  B-schools are investing consistently to update their curriculum for meeting the talent demand of the ever-evolving business needs in the market. A top B-School helps one cultivate professional connections and establish a pull for leading companies to hire candidates from particular institutions. Developing the ability to harness the power of digital innovation and a flexible teaching process is imperative to staying relevant.  Suresh Ramanathan, Dean, Great Lakes Institute of Management Chennai points out how attention through entertainment kept the education system going through the crisis year by drawing its parallel with advertising. How efficiently an educator keeps students and the industry engaged is the real challenge. “The more we engage, the more we pique curiosity. The sense of curiosity must be inculcated at all times. Engagement must first be cognitive and then emotional,” he says.

Rebooting curriculum
Considering the evolving business landscape, recruiters are demanding better alignment between B-School curricula and market job requirements. The courses have been traditionally designed to arm students with hard skills of management-finance, accounting, marketing, operations and more. Additionally, universities are introducing courses on blockchain and data analytics. With the advent of AI, blockchain, 5G, IoT and the like, digital literacy is becoming even more critical for students. As this is still uncharted territory, the necessary case studies and teaching material are formed in real-time, combining the contemporary development of technology in respective sectors. Analytics and data-intensive programs must be imbibed in the curriculums as these are high in demand in the industry.

However, there is a need to match pace by making required changes to a traditional curriculum. As tech upgrade takes centre stage, B-Schools must infuse a tech-first approach. Content needs must be improvised, imbibing the sectoral changes across the industries such as fintech, digital marketing or social media engagement and more. Apart from digital, there is an emphasis on soft skill-building and expanding the ideas, knowledge, and capabilities of its students with perspective courses such as ethics in management and strategic leadership, global context of management, leadership labs and managing groups.

Radical innovation
Certain skills and areas, which weren’t earlier as prominent, have emerged as key business differentiators. These include sustainability and ESG (environment, social, governance), ethics, innovation and entrepreneurship, even connected mobility. The youngest country in the world, India is facing a ‘skills gap’. Businesses are vulnerable today to a set of unexpected changes. Business schools need to bring these new dimensions into their curriculum and acknowledge the scope to adjust their programs to create a sync with the potential interest inclination and learnability of a student. According to World Economic Forum, innovation, self-management, learnability, working with people are the key skills for future leaders.

“Corporates and B-Schools already work closely with each other but what if room for an even closer collaboration, characterised by greater hands-on, practical experience and a more equitable flow of knowledge, existed?” asks Santanu Ghoshal, Vice President, Human Resources and Head – CSR, Schaeffler India.

For instance, India’s B-Schools, among the most evolved practitioners of education, churn out the most employable candidates. About 55 per cent of the MBA graduates tested as part of the India Skills Report were found to be employable, up there with B.E. and B.Tech graduates that marked an improvement from the 46.5 per cent found employable last year. Going against the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, universities are pivoting and broadening their range of courses. B-School grads could be the best performing job seeker or even job creators.

Evaluating excellence
B-Schools are not a definitive guide to becoming a success story. Much rides on the abilities one hones beyond their grades in academics. A survey of organisations recruiting MBA graduates reveals that the skills gap hiring professionals face was a lack of problem-solving skills. The business school environment is perfect for working on competencies of creative intelligence. Cognitive and behavioural skill-building has become an imperative in the new normal, across industries. The students of B-Schools are groomed to be the top performers in business-centric skills but the contemporary situations require candidates who hone skills such as problem-solving, conflict management, critical thinking, swift decision making, disruptive, agile thinking, the power of collective taking calls and collaborations. Golden stars in scorecards are good to an extent but as the business dynamics are rapidly changing, institutions must nurture learnability and focus on soft skills by developing the capability needed to navigate the businesses even in turbulent times. As the world has recently seen such uncertainty and ambiguity that finding the ‘perfect-fit’ seems the most difficult task. “Who is an ideal student in the new world classroom?” asks Ranjan Banerjee, Dean, BITSoM Mumbai. Reflecting on what creates future-fit skills, he says, “How can we expect a whole-brain thinking, when one is only examining and admitting left-brain thinking.” He believes that an institution must nurture both, job seekers and job creators along with focusing on the whole spectrum of diversity.

A call for change
To perpetuate a continuum of learning, cognitive and behavioural skill-building, educators are expected to adopt a bent of mind where they can build an encouraging ecosystem of learning ultimately to be able to make potential talent capable of driving behavioural change alongside business growth. Sundaravaradhan Venkatesh, Professor, SME, Shiv Nadar University remarks, “Teaching has changed globally and offered an opportunity to go back to the drawing board, relook and ponder that are our universities and curriculums fit for today’s dynamics?” With the advent of teaching through the virtual medium in the wake of the pandemic, teachers, educators and professors have pushed their limits to be able to deliver the best to the learners. The pandemic has rejigged these learning methods, some of which may never reverse. There has been a change in mindset from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘facilitator’. Also, there has been an increase in the formative and authentic assessment, along with rethinking the role of technology.  Despite the flexibility online education online is offering, a few aspects are being impacted badly. The recent constraints during the pandemic have immensely affected social skills like individuals’ presentability, corporate-apt social behaviour, peer-to-peer learning. The approach of teaching too is likely to be more application-driven studies rather than just theoretical teaching. To suffice this,  institutes must invest in building better technical infrastructure to offer more live projects and simulation exercises to learners.

Focusing on creating a diverse class mix, Matt Symonds, Co-Founder, Fortuna Admissions and CentreCourt MBA and Masters Festivals underlines the utmost importance of academic excellence and also highlights the need to bring in students from across the world. He says, “Business schools must globalise their learning design, understand cross-functional sensibility and focus on delivering up to the demands of their diverse class mix.” Symonds compliments the quality of Indian academics and cites examples such as Twitter’s Global CEO Parag Agrawal and Chanel’s newly appointed CEO, Leena Nair, to indicate the strength of Indian B-School education.
Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, Chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), explains that the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020 promotes multifaceted and multi-disciplinary learning in many ways. “B-schools should make the best use of the NEP framework and emerge stronger as degree-granting institutions,” he adds.  

What does industry want? 
The CXOs are constantly examining managerial and leadership characteristics that can trace and define future business leaders in the era of disruption. Hence, while identifying the right skillset and promising potential, the hiring war for the right talent stays on. New-age virtual learning has witnessed a boom in its demand that came with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Dibyendu Bose, Senior Director of Admissions, Indian School of Business (ISB) refers to multifaceted elements that are crucial for students’ development. “There is a huge demand for analytical thinking. Corporates are looking for candidates who are not only good in analytics but also excel in business development and digital transformation,” ISB’s Bose adds.

India’s Skill Report states that 46 per cent of graduates are currently unemployed. “Non-employability must be thought through and definitive actions must be taken to change this. The future is hybrid. We must strive to make offline and online education equal, which is in sync with our ethos and guiding principles. Hence, there lies a huge challenge for management colleges,” comments Rajiv Kumar, Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog.  The dynamics of businesses are changing every second which requires a high degree of agility as to how to accept the change, process its implications and react in order to make it work successfully. Amit Khanna, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers while sharing a corporate perspective alludes to this mindset change. He says, “A person would be hired who can adapt and work in an environment where a man and machine co-exist and function together.”

Talent acquisition landscape 
Acquiring the right talent can be a challenging task because a poorly designed recruitment process can miss out on highly-qualified job candidates. Virtual onboarding and recruitment online have seen a rise and will stay for long, the way an employer recruits affects the individuals it hires and also the bottom line of the organisation. The new breed of executives is different from past generations. They are not just pursuing traditional job-satisfaction matrices like rewards and careers, but they want to go beyond and make a positive impact. “Young executives today are not satisfied with just the salaries and promotions; they want their work to make an impact on society and environment. B-Schools and corporates must support and nurture this spirit,” says CP Gurnani, MD & CEO, Tech Mahindra.

B-Schools of tomorrow
B-Schools are required to be agile, introduce micro-certification that offers students a higher level of flexibility, focus on future readiness, assess the needs of recruiters to be able to stay relevant and sustain in these times. Learner-centric management education is in the process of taking precedence over any other aspect in B-Schools, helping them create a competitive advantage. India’s leading B-Schools have the potential to withstand challenges, break the mould and catalyse new-age transformation to prepare students for the new world.