In the last two decades, there has been a massive expansion of private sector, self financing professional education. In the initial years of the post liberalization period since there was a huge demand supply gap (demand for professionally qualified workforce far outstripping its supply); all business schools managed to ensure 100% placement. This has created a situation where business schools are being viewed as a gateway to employment. The business schools too flaunt their campus placement and salary packages as their USP. However, over the years things have changed. The substantial increase in number of business schools reduced the demand supply gap. The global recession worsened the situation further; campus placement became more and more difficult. Yet another reason for declining campus placement has poor quality of management graduates produced by many business schools. In the year 2009-10, many economic indicators were suggesting global recovery. In India, we had been fortunate enough to record reasonably good GDP growth rate. However, its impact on placement had been marginal. It may be because of the fact that companies may be redeploying the staff retrenched earlier on. The only difference in that placement season had been in a quantitative increase in job offers but the pay packet had not increased.
This year once again it is being publicized that good times are back again. In its front page article dt.12.10.10, Tuesday, The Economic Times headline states “IT Biggies vroom back on job street” and explains that ‘with business from large foreign customers as well as domestic projects picking up, software firms are hiring like never before.’ The paper further informs us that according to Nasscom, Indian IT will hire around 90,000 this year, compared with 20,000 last year as cos stalled hiring plans, out of which main recruiters would be TCS (40,000), Infosys (30,000), WIPRO (14,000) but we would advise the students not to get swayed by such tell claims.
We believe that the placement activity should not be adhoc arrangement between the company and the campus. We believe in a continuous and an ongoing industry institute interaction. The Institute should adopt a focused approach and setup a centre of advanced learning in key sectors. A good business school should accordingly train its student so that they could become employable right from the very beginning. This approach reduces the training cost of the recruiters. In the developed world many leading business schools are funded by the corporate. There is a much deeper association between the institute and industry in these cases. Presently we do not see any tendency of Indian Institution to be moving in that direction.
It has been observed that the last semester / trimester of most of the professional degrees and diplomas is mainly devoted to project. The students are asked to submit a project report in consultation with some faculty supervisor. In most of these cases, the project reports submitted are nothing but a composition of the material downloaded from various websites and copied from previous reports. Those students who get campus placement do not take it seriously because there is hardly anything at stake. On the other hand, those students who were still looking for job, it is more important to get placed than doing genuine project work. We suggest a industry academic interaction in this situation for both sides. The students could be given a certain portion of training in the institute it self under the supervision of the recruiters. This would reduce the training time and cost of the employer and the student will also be taking this project work more seriously. In case this happens, it would be a welcome step.
Dr. J.K. Goyal
Director
Jagan Institute of Management Studies
Rohini, New Delhi