Management Education

In the coming 4-5 months over 500,000 students will aspire for that dream MBA career through CAT/MAT/XAT/NMAT and other State tests. And less than 5 percent will make the cut of the Top 50 B-Schools. What should the others do?

There are more than 2000 Bschools in India where students pay between Rs. 2-6 lacs fee, hoping to find their dream career. Unfortunately, most of these schools (beyond the Top 100) are actually running on a meager 20-40% placements. Remaining students leave the campus either without a job or end up working on some low skill base job. Think about this: 2 in 3 of all MBAs in India remain either un-employed or severly under-employed!

Why is this happening? Of course, there are larger issues of student input quality (today anyone who can spend Rs 5 lacs can get an MBA/PGDM degree without any entry level selection criteria). And larger issues of academic delivery quality (most run-of-the-mill colleges spend less than 10% of their revenues on actual academic delivery). But that doesn’t help students who have already enrolled. What can they do?

To find out why our MBAs are not employed, Elements Akademia conducted an intensive nation-wide research amongst the CXOs / HR Heads of more than 40 companies from various verticals, 60 MBA / PGDM colleges across 12 cities and more than 3000 students and MBA aspirants.

Enough has been written on “employability skills” or their lack thereof amongst most Indian students. Essential for any job aspirant, these are non-technical skills and competencies which play a significant part in contributing to an individual’s effective and successful participation in the workplace. As per a report by NASSCOM, a mere 10% of fresh graduates are actually employable! Similar surveys on Engineers and MBAs put employable professionals no more than 25% – net, a vast majority of even professionally qualified people are not industry ready.

What are Employability Skills: Our own past research – with 40 companies – had identified 9 Missing Elements which limits the candidate’s employability:

Every year thousands of MBA students pass out from different colleges, but very few get desired jobs. While they apply in multiple companies, the response given to them is dismal as they are not selected anywhere.