Academic and business circles have now identified the need for appropriate management education for imparting the requisite skills to job aspirants. The relevance of existing curricula of management education, is being doubted upon worldwide. The employers lament that the management graduates lack the skills and attitudes required to work effectively. Apart from the quantitative skills, most other managerial skills are essentially "soft-skills", e.g., interpersonal and communication skills. While domain knowledge is necessary, managerial skills help individuals convert their knowledge into effective action. Against this background, this paper tries to identify the managerial skills which the employers look for in new recruits, explores the role of college festivals in development of these skills in graduate students, and compares the on-the-job performance of those who were involved in college festivals as students and those who were not.
The
London Business School, in a global survey of over 100 global firms across a variety
of industries in 20 countries, discovered that employers were totally dissatisfied
with the management graduates as they were not meeting the needs of their businesses.
The September 18, 2004 issue of Straits Times quotes their dean, Laura
Tyson, that: "…the corporate leaders produced an extensive list of qualities
they desired in future recruits, but almost none involved functional or technical
knowledge. All their requirements could be summed up as follows—the need
for more thoughtful, more aware, more sensitive, more flexible, more adaptive
managers capable of being molded and developed into global executives."
Several
studies point to the employer dissatisfaction with management graduates' skill
sets. According to Hancock (1998), "MBAs were seen as technically brilliant
but lacking in social skills". The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools
of Business (AACSB) International's Management Education Task Force report entitled,
"Management Education at Risk (2002)" contends, "…although
interpersonal, leadership, and communication skills are rated high in terms of
importance, they often are rated among the least focused components of business
school curricula". According to Crainer and Dearlove (1999), "managers
need softer people skills as well; they cannot solely rely on number-crunching
analytical ability to be effective in today's business environment". |
