In the rapidly changing business environment, managing business successfully and sustaining success on a long-term basis has become the most crucial and challenging task for corporates, the world over. In order to survive and succeed in this competitive environment, managers should be able to visualise the ever increasing customer expectations and offer suitable products and services mirroring such expectations. In other words, what becomes imperative for organisations to remain at the forefront and beat the competition is to continually focus on product innovation and service quality. How can this be achieved? One bet is to ensure that the organisation has adequate number of managers who dream with the customers and innovate on products and services on an ongoing basis.
Managers who are entrepreneurial, and very much alive to the challenges of the business world and who can visualise what the customers expect, are in great demand today. But in reality, there are not many such managers around. It is in this context, that the role of management schools and that of the corporates, become relevant for our discussion. The immediate question that arises is what the management schools, which are fairly large in number in our country, and Corporate India, can do together to address this issue. Undoubtedly, the Government at the State and the central level can also play a significant supportive role in this regard.
In this article, an attempt has been made to examine the role of corporates in improving the management education in our country. The support corporates can extend to the management schools and the kind of understanding there can be between these two, to optimise the mutual relationship, are the key aspects.
Industry exposure
Many management experts believe that those who teach management should have managerial experience or at least adequate contact with the business world. In the context of what has been happening around and the emerging challenges of the business world, there cannot be many who disagree with this view. But the reality is something different. In many of our management schools, faculty members have only minimal managerial experience. Cases where faculty members having hardly any such experience at all, are also not rare. One would agree that adequate exposure to real world situation would stand in good stead for faculty members to connect effectively theory and practice during their lecture sessions. One major reason for this inadequacy could be attributed to the fact that the education system, particularly the management education in our country, has been comparatively slow to the rapid changes that have been taking place in the business world.
If we really want to build business skills in our management students by the time they graduate and are ready to make a career option, they need to have the real world exposure. Ideally, the whole thing that goes on in the business world should lock stock and barrel be mirrored to the management students as part of their curriculum for full one semester. This not only prepares them to meet the challenges of changing times but also helps them identify and choose a career best suited to their knowledge, skill and aptitude.
Summer Internship Program
The Summer Internship Program (SIP), available as a part of the curriculum in some of the business schools, particularly IIMs, ICFAI National colleges and a few other management schools, is indeed a right step in this direction. The SIP of these colleges’ bridge theory and practice effectively by giving the students the much needed real world exposure. During SIP, students are given opportunity to work for a company and get exposure to the corporate work life, its pulls and pressures. Business organisations select students from these reputed management schools for undergoing internship with them, either on payment of incentives or stipend or even both. On completion of the SIP, based on their performance, a good number of the students get placement offers in the same organisations. One would agree, therefore, that summer internship programme as part of academic curriculum, does serve as an effective tool to connect theory and practice. Yet, with a little introspection by captains of industry as well as academia, they would find there is ample scope for improving the present system of SIP practised in a few management schools in our country.
The first and foremost issue is the role of corporates in improving the effectiveness of SIP. While majority of the corporates do take SIP as a meaningful and productive exercise, there is a greater need today to institutionalise this system by all corporates mainly as a HRD process. A well-defined policy on summer internship by the HR departments, and a monitoring mechanism to ensure effective implementation of the policy, would facilitate a more meaningful and effective role by corporates in this regard. Undoubtedly, this becomes possible only if the top management is committed to institutionalise the process of SIP more as a developmental role of a corporate citizen rather than merely ‘accommodating’ the management students to undergo practical training in their companies.
If corporate policy clearly envisages summer placement as part of the HR Policy, it facilitates the management schools to source such companies for summer internship. Ideally, there should be greater demand from the corporates for summer placement as one of the HR policy initiatives. However, in most of the cases, this does not happen as it is normally the business schools which seek placement support from companies. I hasten to add, progressive and professionally managed organisations do place students for summer internship, leading to skill acquisition and development of positive work habits by the students. All the same, there have been cases where year end work pressure and other corporate priorities shadow the importance of summer internship training, thus making the whole affair a mere effort to fulfil an academic requirement. Such cases, though not frequent, have had negative impact on the morale of students.
Collaboration between the Business Schools and the Corporates. Keeping in view the increasing need for industry- academia collaboration as a boost to management education in our country, it should be the endeavour of both, corporates and business schools to have formal arrangements and understanding, to place students for internship. Companies should take policy initiatives to see that formal MOUs are entered into by them with reputed business schools. Of course, such arrangements are not unfamiliar, neither for the management schools nor for the corporates. There have been a few such partnership arrangements between the corporates and the business schools.*** But, what is more important is that such collaboration should take place frequently as a planned strategy as a measure aimed at improved level of industry -academia collaboration. . Such tie-up arrangements should cover areas such as training field & duration, stipend/incentives, performance standards for final placement, regular industry academia interface as part of curriculum, etc.
Possibly, governmental intervention by way of suitable directions to the corporates and management schools in this regard might as well act as a fillip to the entire process. Let Corporate India and the business schools thus join hands together to create more and more entrepreneurial business managers for our country!
