June 21, 2008

Is MBA all about research?

Is MBA all about research experience?

Management institutes in India and abroad generally prefer to recruit those as faculty who have a PhD degree. Such PhD professors may lack the work experience in corporate/industry and have never got an opportunity to experience & understand business management. Therefore they fail to properly make aware the students about the real management environment in the corporate resulting in severe mismatch in the skill portfolio of the students and the demands of the corporate world.

MBA course in India has become very popular due to economic growth & the privatization of the education sector. Lots of grads are joining the newly opened Business Management schools with a hope to make it big in the corporate world. Being a faculty member at three such institutes I have the opportunity to appreciate the prevalent circumstances.

There are some subjects like Marketing, Sales Management, Distribution, SCM, CRM, Strategic Management that definitely require some exposure to the real market place. It is not possible to disseminate these subjects without referring to some real life cases from the current business scenario. When I was studying for MBA at Punjab University, my marketing professor could not tell which were the leading advertising agencies in India only. Sic.

Professor holding PhD degrees and teaching Marketing Research to MBA students would be unaware of AC Nielsen! Please ask you teacher of research if s/he has ever heard of ac Nielsen. What kind of education are we talking about?

Agreed that a good business management course must follow a multi disciplinary approach and one requires a general smattering of Psychology, Sociology, Economics, Mathematics etc, but how could you a scenario when majority of the teachers have no knowledge and experience of the corporate world? Walk in any nearest business school in India and discover the truth for yourself. How could we support our economic growth if the human resources lack on quality?

The b-schools in India must encourage and invite professionals with industry experience to teach real stuff to the students. This would enhance the economic growth of India. If the b-schools give due preference to industry experience and not insist on PhD degree the quality of education would certainly improve inside the classroom. And the corporate sector would definitely get ‘ready to use’ human resources. In my opinion we need to put professional in charge of business education than mere theoretical teachers with PhD degrees and no real knowledge of the corporate.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thts right...thts the major catastrophe wth our PTU affiliated colleges as well..with due reverence to all, our teachers are mainly those who failed to get a footing in the corporate...in institutes like IIMs its all in the hands of Profs(mind you frnz..those profs are absolutely stupendous n all have an ample amount of industry experience)..ask these PHD labeled teachers to design a business strategy or do some real marketing stuff n u'll see their real colors...

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