Is our Academic Curriculum making us Employable?

Unanimously we all agree that what we learn in our academics have little or nothing to offer in delivering our professional responsibilities. So much so that, we often may question ourselves how much weight the curriculum carries in providing a suitable career opportunity. The solution is to select a job-relevant course.

Our education should make us capable of pursuing our jobs better. For example, good communication is part and parcel of every field of career. But very few education programmes in our country have actually incorporated such a subject in the curriculum. It is in this context that we should talk more about the relevance of our academic courses. Acquiring relevant job-skill is one of the most important aspects of learning programmes. With constant technological evolution, the skill-set requirements have also changed. However, the scenario in the Indian education sector is still outdated.

In fact, a study by ASSOCHAM revealed that B-schools of India were able to make only a 7% of the graduates employable, which indeed reflects their incompetence of creating proficient management professional. The reasons behind such failure are adaptability of primeval course curriculum and unaltered traditional approach of the colleges lacking industry synchronization.

Take this example; the marketing executives of today are struggling to perform in the digital arena due to the old-school marketing concepts taught to them, where digital marketing was either elided or subsisted. It is still a matter of concern since the b-schools are not understanding and stressing upon the importance of digital marketing to be a part of the management course curriculum. And even if they do, it’s regretful to state that the concepts being taught are obsolete and doesn’t exalt the necessitated skills.

It is imperative for any successful management professional to have such skills, along with other basic life skills such as cooking, filing your taxes or even fixing a tire. Without these crucial lessons, the whole purpose of gaining education becomes insignificant.

Reshaping the Curriculum, Reshaping the Future

Our learned academicians, therefore, should emphasize on crafting job-relevant courses, the curriculum that enables us to carry out professional responsibilities well. It is in this pursuit, many private education institutes have included programmes like group discussion, financial management, soft-skills, teamwork and leadership courses to yield a better result. To meet this demand-supply gap, many institutes have designed Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) or MBA and other professional courses those are better equipped in making individuals job relevant.

There is also a need for better teaching methodology and technologically advanced pedagogy to impart required skills and domain knowledge to students. Continuously upgraded curriculum delivered by the skilled academicians and proficient business leaders is the only hope for improving the higher education in India to create a ‘win-win’ situation for students, colleges, and recruiters as well.

Furthermore, research says we should enable students to go deeper in dealing with any subject. For example, if the curriculum stresses more towards the why and how of everything, it will transform the pattern of learning into a job-relevant study model.

Also, expanding the thinking process and expressing an opinion can be included in the curriculum that will lead to impart skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, etc those are pre-requisite for a flourishing career.

By Piyush Nangru, COO & Co-Founder, Sunstone Eduversity