India's Best Business Schools- Experts View (Dr. Abhishek Nirjar)

Future of Management Education

Dr. Abhishek Nirjar - Director, IFIM Business School

Management education has grown and evolved over the past few decades in India. It has grown in terms of quantity with many universities and business schools mushrooming across the country offering management programmes. This has been an important development as it has contributed to establishing a critical mass for producing qualified management professionals for the corporate sector. Barring the top 50 institutions, there is a question mark on the quality of delivery of the remaining institutions. There are very few schools that have or aspire to provide the kind of education that would qualify as high-quality education.

The future of management education depends on a number of important factors. The first and foremost of all is the globalisation of management education. Indian schools have to work hard to establish themselves as ‘global’ institutions of repute. This would certainly be a tedious task and needs a lot of planning and seamless execution. The other two important factors are that technology has like all other fields also begun to invade the education sector in a big way. So there is a lot that will happen with the use of technology in management education. At the same time, the fact that with this information boom and the pressure that executives are facing in order to deliver a good performance on their job is forcing them to consider qualifications and competence enhancement programmes that are shorter in duration and do not demand physical presence for the full duration of the course.

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This factor has a significant impact on the future. So while the prospective recipient of management education has undergone and is undergoing significant change in aspirations, temperament and expectations, those in the domain of providing these programmes are faced with a set of challenges that they have to deal with. The curriculum design and delivery modes, and the faculty and their competence areas are the biggest challenge. In recent times, there has begun a debate about the extent to which the curriculum is relevant to the needs of the industry and are B-schools producing employable professionals? The answer to this is no. The age old model of the two-year MBA/ PGDM in terms of what is taught and how it is taught is losing its relevance.

There is so much of technology being introduced in the education and training domain, business analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence etc., are emerging as important domains of knowledge and application that have gained paramount importance in business education. All this has led to a strong need for a fresh look at the curriculum, the delivery mechanism and the assessment while focusing on enhanced employability. All this calls for a radical shift in the overall concept of the MBA/PGDM. While the curriculum renewal requires industry participation, somewhere it also needs to look at the manner in which core and electives are organised. The age-old functional domains of Marketing, Finance, HRM, Operations, Strategy are witnessing blurring of boundaries and it seems appropriate to state that the future lies for those who demonstrate a high level of competence in not one or two rather multiple functions. At the same time knowledge of technology tools has now become imperative for all.

The manner in which courses are delivered will witness a sea change. Long hours in the classroom will become a story of the past. B-schools of today will need to shift their focus from simply providing bookish knowledge or use of case method of teaching to giving due consideration to the learning style of the current generation. This generation is tech savvy and with overflowing access to information, they need to be addressed with a different approach to teaching. Faculty will have to focus on providing value-add sessions. 

The curriculum will need to be designed in such a manner that a portion of courses are undertaken by the students through self-learning mode using online resources from Harvard, etc. and blend it to the high value add sessions by the faculty in the classrooms. This calls for the faculty to be not just up to the mark with value adding know-how and learnings which can come only through industry exposure. Somewhere there is a need to reduce the number of hours in the class and pay more attention to facilitating learning for the student through other mechanisms. Live assignments, written reports in the form of problem solving consultancy work should be included so that students develop the competence to address a practical problem, do an assessment and propose a solution through it. Assessment of learning can take different routes which does not always end in a written end-term examination. There will be a significant use of technology in assessment in times to come.

To put it all together, the future of management education will witness a transformed curriculum, a mixed delivery mechanism, unique assessment methodology and competence development programmes of varied duration and levels.