The Creation Of A Better Practitioner
The pandemic has created an imperative for organisations to reconfigure their operations and has also given an opportunity to transform. While the overall business confidence has remained subdued due to growing concerns of the new variant of Covid-19, the services sector is doing extremely well, says Ramakrishnan Raman, Director, Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM), Pune & Dean, Faculty of Management, Symbiosis International ( Deemed University).
Edited Excerpts:
What do you see as some of the highlights of the year that will continue to impact management education in 2022?
While the pandemic has made organisations and businesses rethink and streamline the process to run the show during a crisis scenario, a new orientation is necessary for almost every business from education to entertainment, from retail to re-finance, from information technology to industrial engineering on unleashing the power of technology to make the processes better and efficient.
The job additions in the services sectors have immensely helped business schools. B- Schools and engineering colleges have seen active hiring from technology consulting, retail, FMCS, e-commerce, banking and financial services and telecom as well. The demand for talent with expertise in technology blended with management skills has seen an unprecedented rise. The demand for tech professionals continues to soar especially in the IT services and consulting space.
The pandemic has possibly changed the way consumers shop as it has induced changes in shopping behaviour forever which has altered consumer businesses.
The data published by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) indicates that the acceptance of digital payment in India, which has made the value of digital transactions using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) cross $100 billion in October 2021.
Mobile payments in India are now growing faster than card payments as more consumers and businesses have accepted mobile digital payments as the de facto mode of payment.
Similar is the case for the concept of ‘work from home’ which was popular only in the IT sector. The crisis has made the concept of remote working to be accepted and adopted by industries across all sectors and many organisations have permanently moved jobs to home. These changes are here to stay.
In future, a significant percentage of the workforce in high-skilled jobs in sectors such as finance, insurance, and IT could work the majority of its time from home and be just as effective as working from the office. This is happening not just because of the crisis but also because of the advances in automation and digitisation; the use of which has been accelerated during the pandemic.
This needs a new orientation for organisations as there are new challenges and opportunities related to the transition to working away from the office.
Organisations have to make decisions on everything from real estate to workplace design and from training to technology implementation. Returning to the office would not be simply opening the door and asking the employees to walk in.
Companies must consciously look at ‘cultural change’ along with systematic planning to understand who should be called back to the company premises and what exactly the office brings to the organisation.
Several manufacturing firms across the globe also need a new orientation to rethink and streamline their supply chain operations. The pandemic has revealed serious vulnerabilities in the supply chains of several companies.
Many businesses do not have a good idea of what is going on lower down in their supply chains. The pandemic has clearly shown how the sub-tiers and sub-sub-tiers play small but critical roles in production and business continuity.
Many management institutes seem to prioritise data in creating or upgrading courses. What are your thoughts on this at SIBM?
All B-Schools must focus on imparting skills and knowledge related to the use of data. At SIBM Pune, from the year 2017, we have been offering the subjects related to data science and data analytics a part of the core course pack.
In fact at SIBM Pune, from the academic year 2022, we are introducing ‘data analytics’ as a specialisation. We also have courses like ‘Design Thinking’ ‘Conflict and Negotiation’ and ‘Indian Ethos and Values for Management’, ‘Creativity and Problem Solving’ and a few others which make the MBA and MBA (Innovation and Entrepreneurship) programme unique.
B-Schools must focus on imparting skills and value by revamping the curriculum and not just creating industry-ready individuals but graduates who can lead the industry.
How has on-campus education evolved?
This again is the ‘cost to value’ proposition. Right from the early 1990s, several universities offered bachelors and master’s degrees in the distance mode. It gave the conviction to students to pursue bachelors or masters by staying at home. Later from 2010, edtech startups emerged that offered certifications in the specific subject area online.
Till the pandemic hit, there was a debate on the pros and cons of online education. During the pandemic, all higher education institutions and even the schools were forced to fully switch on to the online mode. This made students and even parents, who always depended on the offline mode of education, experience the fully online mode of education. There are a few who enjoyed this and many others who got fed up with this.
Aristotle the legendary Greek philosopher said, ‘Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual’.
This has been proved right, as the majority of students, both at school and college level were waiting for the institutions to open so that they can return back to campus and interact in person with friends and teachers.
Even if augmented reality and virtual reality become popular, affordable and adopted by schools and higher educational institutions, on-campus education will have its own demand. The immersive experience that it gives would come at a cost and there will be students who will be willing to pay that cost for the experience that they would get.
We are compelled to adopt the hybrid learning mode as we can’t allow those students who are not vaccinated or force those students who do not wish to attend the classes in person.
What are the steps being taken to upgrade and reskill faculties?
When the pandemic hit, we took steps to orient the faculty members to the online platform. We made all faculty members get the Microsoft Teams certification. All faculty members of SIBM Pune got certified as Microsoft Innovative Educators.
They also were given training and acquired the certification including - fetting started with OneNote, One Note Teacher Academy, Independent learning with math tool in OneNote, OneNote Staff Notebook: Tools for staff collaboration, and OneNote Class Notebook: A teacher’s all in one notebook for students.
We also had collaborative sharing sessions where faculty members shared their experiences and learnings about the online classes so that we could learn from each other’s experiences.
After gaining expertise, we collaborated with FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry) and delivered training sessions to faculty members across universities and B-Schools in India on the use of technology in online teaching and learning.
Tell us about internships and placements during this time.
Internships and placements are a natural outcome of the MBA program at SIBM Pune. Creating startups or innovating in the family managed business is the focus of the MBA (innovation and internship) program.
The robust alumni network that we have and the crème de la crème students who join SIBM Pune ensure that the stipend offered during the summer internship and the CTC offered during the final placement always break the previous records.
The full-time and visiting faculty members engage and guide the students in a meticulous way which also immensely helps them in internships and also in their journey of creating startups.
Where can we seek improvement in our management education?
One parameter in which Indian B-Schools and management institutions lack is the research output by the faculty members.
A global ranking like the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) – the UK company which specialises in the analysis of higher education institutions around the world and THE (Times Higher Education) world university rankings by Times Higher Education magazine give a high percentage of marks for research output by faculty members.
They measure the research output by considering the number of publications that an institution has in Scopus – which is an Elsevier’s abstract and citation database or Web of Science – which is a website that provides comprehensive citation data for many different academic disciplines.
The majority of Indian B-Schools and universities have always focused on creating talent who can join the industry or create a startup. They have not focused research and hence score low on research output.
This makes Indian B-Schools and universities score low in the ranking and excludes them from the list of best global B-Schools.
To be present in the globally renowned B-Schools, the faculty members of Indian B-Schools must start focusing on creating knowledge and showcase the same by publishing in academic and high impact business and management journals listed in Scopus and Web of Science.
It is hence not just the rat race of placement and internships but also about the race of publishing to prosper and progress, which can help Indian B-Schools to be featured among the global best.
Management education in India is here to stay. As long as there are problems to be solved and people and machines to be managed, MBA graduates and innovators will always be in demand.
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