Creating a Market in Knowledge Industry …. for creating better Managers of tomorrow
Content is something people take for granted when comes to higher education especially in management. Most of the 1000+ management institutions in India don’t know what they are teaching. Partially because they don’t really care about it and, partially because they don’t have control over what is been taught. More than 90% of management education institutions literally “RUNs” on scores of Visiting Faculties (VF) or so called Industry Experts (IE). None of the affiliating bodies and universities give due importance to the content which needs to be revised on a year-on-year basis and tend to become infrastructure approval and inspection bodies.
The recent trend in management education is a year-on-year decrease in enrollment and increased feedback from recruiting companies about the lack of quality of students. I agree we are not talking about IIMs here. All we are talking about is how to create excellent bench strength for emerging India to manage itself in a professional way. This is only possible by grooming the would-be-entry level executives to take up leadership roles of future. For this the foundation on which their decision taking ability should be strong. Today they are at the mercy of the so called Faculties who comes a part time side kick interest to make some easy money. If by chance the instructor happens to be a genuine person and he facilitates the learning process well, the students benefit. What if this doesn’t happen? How can this process of facilitation of knowledge transfer and its efficacy be left to chance? Management Education institutes need to have serious thoughts running through their minds to stop this trend of letting the future of students shape by chance, otherwise the already degraded quality will become worse and corporate will lose the faith on these kinds of institutions and students completely.
It is high time that we take a hard look both at the content and its delivery mechanism in higher management education. Majority of the colleges are still using the old university guidelines both in content and its delivery mechanism. Management education is like a war college where on the spot decisions as well as tactical decisions rules the turf. Theory and knowledge is only for the back of the mind envelope calculations. DECISION MAKING is a skill which comes only through rigorous practice. Our current “PPT education method” doesn’t allow decision making, for that we want facilitation approach to knowledge and situational learning.
I believe content for education should be people independent in any stream of education. That’s why I wrote “creating a market” as the headline. Educational institutions are still to realize the importance of the word People Independent and their current system is degrading the whole educational ecosystem day by day. Institutions need to realize the importance of both content and the processes of delivery and take corrective steps towards it. Creating this big realization itself is a big task which will need big push and more persuasion but it is an inevitable mindset shift needed in this industry.