We had witnessed a magnificent era for
management graduates where they used
to get a stipend even during their summer
training or other project works. There was a defined career path for
management graduates in various organizations. They used
to start their career as management trainees and
were absorbed into middle-management at the completion of such training. Any
management graduate was sure of being placed in a position
of repute. But now, we are also witnessing a
drastic change in this scenario. Today, the situation
has deteriorated to such an extent that a
management graduate may not be offered a stipend as it used
to happen earlier. It is not that this critical
situation pertains to a specific geographical region, but
is prevailing in general throughout India. If any
B-School is not able to place its graduates appropriately, it can be simply concluded that it
is not able to sell it's final product. This has
brought many B-Schools to the verge of extinction.
Only those B-Schools paying attention to the
qualitative aspects of their management graduates
are expected to succeed in today's challenging and nervous times.
The placement crisis has not hit B-Schools overnight, but numerous factors were
responsible for this change and the change has been
gradual and visible. The first and foremost reason for
such a crisis is the prevailing change in our
economy and even in the recent global economic
scenario. Though liberalization, privatization and globalization have created enormous
employment opportunities, the after-effects of this
are contributing increasing the gap between demand and supply of management graduates
in contemporary times. After liberalization, privatization and globalization, there has been
a tremendous increase in the supply of management graduates. However, the demand has not
increased in a similar fashion. The gap between the
demand and supply of management graduates is
increasing day by day due to mushrooming of new management institutes—quantity and quality
are, in general, inversely proportional. The increase
in the number of institutes has definitely
contributed to the dilution of quality of the output. The
entry requirements have been eased to provide input
to the gigantically increasing number of
management institutes. This phenomenal growth has
been lacking in vision and, as such, there is
acute shortage of faculty members in terms of
quality. This has led to a compromise at the
transformation process level. The infrastructural requirements
are not fulfilled in many institutes.
All these
factors have added to the misery of placements by deteriorating the quality of output. This
has negatively affected the employability of management graduates. These graduates
are unemployable due to many reasons, lack of knowledge, lack of technical skills, lack of
soft skills, etc., being the important ones. Unemployability has increased to the extent
that the HR departments have to interview a large number of applicants in order to select
one suitable candidate. This particular fact
suggests that the competition among applicants has inadvertently increased, which is further fueled
by decreasing employment opportunities. Employment opportunities are forced to
decrease as the required skill set of the applicant
has changed substantially. Today, every applicant
is expected to be equipped with sound knowledge as well as soft skills and must be computer
savvy. Managers as distinct professionals are not required. Instead, every employee is expected to
be a good manager. |
