You can be intelligent enough to do your MBA, but are you smart manager material? Do you have the suit and tie in place? Speak impeccable English and know all you table manners? MBAs, many believe, need a certain amount of style. About 23 per cent of MBAs passing out of the more that 1500 B-schools of the country are unemployable, it is said. The reason? Many attribute it to lack of proper attitude among the MBAs, poor business communication, low confidence levels, lack of proper grooming and minimal corporate exposure etc.
Are they people who could do with a finishing school?
A lot of hard skills like finance, marketing, operations etc, are easy to teach and easy for the students to read and learn from books. It is also possible for the industry to teach them all these. But soft skills are fairly difficult to teach. We have observed that students with better communication skills have a higher possibility of getting a good job.
Industry Finish
There is now an MBA finishing school, Elements Academia, which claims to enhance potential mangers’ employability.
Our comprehensive employability course includes training on all key aspects missing in today’s MBAs: English, grooming, corporate awareness, attitude, domain knowledge, etc. The entire module has been designed with different companies. About 25 per cent of delivery is by a senior IIM alumnus or faculty. We help in summers and final placements in our partner companies or beyond and actually commit to a minimum placement figure. May be the top 25-30 MBA institutes do not need it but all other MBA institutes desperately need a finishing school.
Let the Schools do it
Imparting soft skills training is the responsibility of the individual institutes. However, institutes might collaborate with an external agency if there is a real need. “When we are looking at intervention through finishing schools, it is understood that they would be providing soft skills to students. But soft and technical skills are not mutually exclusive. It is quite the contrary. The increasing perception today is that technical skills are being imparted properly but soft skills are being neglected. Ideally an institute, as regular part of the curriculum, should do the soft skill training and skill building. The objective would be to improve communication skills – both oral and written, build confidence, improving the personality of the student, increase self-belief and work on certain attitudes and behaviour to increase team play skills. This needs a lot of feedback and individual coaching and mentoring.
Apart from domain knowledge, aptitude and competence, what an employer seeks in an MBA are “the right attitude, high energy levels, quickness on the uptake (ability to think quickly), problem solving approach, ability to bring out the best in others as a team player, ability to communicate effectively and capability to influence others and a strong character. And a lot of these required skills may be developed if a student has high self-motivation and an enthusiastic drive to achieve his/her goal – finishing school or no finishing school for that matter.
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