How do you ensure industry involvement in SMOT?

Industry involvement in academia in India is almost nil. Industry has neither any knowledge of academic nor has any plans to even get to know what is happening out there except making a constant demand that the students coming out must be readily employable. What is the contribution they make to make the students employable is anybody’s guess. Academic institutions are competing among themselves now. This should change. Industry must compete to grab the attention of educational institutions.
Industry Institutional interaction must happen at different levels. A. At faculty level, B. at student level. Enough has been said on these.
At SMOT, we have allocated 25% of the courses to be handled by professionals from industry and we pay them sumptuously. Get them to teach, everything else will fall in place – projects, placements, curriculum update, professional approach and so on.

Employability - Fundamental to a professional program...

Employability and selection of students are two different activity. Employability is an essential requirement of a professional course. If the employability factor is not built in to the curriculum, then it is incomplete. There are courses which are for the sake of knowledge, for the sake of building other competencies, but not a professional course like MBA. An institute can have selection criteria to any level, but if the students are not prepared for the professional life, then it is incomplete. SMOT gives utmost importance to employability of its graduates by bringing in focus on what kind of job roll will fit a particular student and what kind of learning to be imparted to the student to achieve that objective. This is fundamental. In the absence of this, there is no point telling the world that we are creating leaders of future when the students do not even know which job they are best at.

MBA Re-Engineered......

Keeping superstructure as it is, just tweak the sub-structure to bring in the much needed focus of role specificity in to the curriculum is what I term as re-engineered MBA. To my surprise, this seems to be quiet an involved exercise and delivering this curriculum to the desired quality will always be a challenge.What is being offered to day stops with functional area specialization. This means, students specializing in marketing, for example, need not necessarily be a good brand manager or a business analyst. For one to become a good brand manager or a business analyst is left to the person to gain experience and has become the responsibility of the company where he or she joins to mould. Close to 80% of the specific knowledge and skills required for a particular role / career track, is gained after MBA with very little input forthcoming as part of the curriculum. Going by the trend, even this seems to be far-fetched expectation, as most of the students passing out of the business schools do not even know what kind of career they look for and where they will best suit at. SMOT curriculum will achieve this very fundamental requirement. Students therefore will know what they are best at and therefore which career / role they will be most suitable for.