Doing an MBA remains a desirable career choice for a lot of young students; in the expectation that their education will prepare them for a challenging and rewarding career. However, the quality of management education in India is patchy, to say the least, and the employability of graduates remains a challenge. Given this scenario in management studies, experts project management education trends that could show the way in times to come:
According to Errol D’Souza, Director, of IIM (A) the post-COVID world presents challenges of imparting experimental learning vis-à-vis merely functional learning. There is now the opportunity to review the curriculum and introduce apposite new topics according to D’Souza. New communication strategies, effective work-from-home methodologies, dealing with stress etc. are some topics that ought to be included in the curriculum.
In recent years, the quality of management education imparted has been seen to decline and graduates are ill-equipped with the skills required for the real corporate world. According to experts a new student-centric approach, which includes interactive sessions, role playing and customised lessons is needed. There also needs to be an emphasis on tech learning, upskilling and re-skilling along with greater industry integration.
With so many businesses going bust in the pandemic scenario, there is a vacuum left that business and management colleges can tap into. Imparting education that includes design thinking processes and innovative management will help create confident professionals with innovative new ideas to help reverse the economic downturn.
Right now with climate change making its impact felt, business managers will have to think in terms of sustainability. Performing corporate social responsibility, reducing the company’s carbon footprint, using low emission technologies are the need of the hour. Management education will have to produce professionals that are able to combine financial knowhow with furthering a low-carbon economy.
Big data holds the promise of divulging hugely valuable information for businesses in the way they work and what they produce. It holds the clues to the way the market performs and insight into the choices that buyers make. Management personnel need to be able to mine data for valuable information and make sense of it all. Plus they need to be well versed with programming languages such as R, python, C, SQL etc.
Experts predict that consultancy will assume even greater significance in the post-COVID world. Management consultants will need to be able to provide accurate business outlooks and obtain fresh industry perspective. To this end, management students will have to be equipped with sector specific expertise to meet industry needs. The bottom line is that B schools and management training institutes will have to keep updating their curriculum to remain relevant and to keep pace with a fast-changing world. It is no longer possible to work with curriculums that remain static for years. Course material and subjects have to keep pace with the current needs of industry and market reality. Students have to keep abreast not only with technological developments but also with rapidly changing social realities.
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