Mba Degree Adding Value In Your Life

You may be smart enough to make your MBA, but you are smart materials manager? Does the suit and tie in place? He speaks English fluently and know all you table manners? MBA, many believe, need a certain amount of style. About 23 percent of MBAs passing out of the more than 1,500 B-schools in the country are unemployed, they say. The reason? Many attribute this to lack of right attitude among the MBA, poor business communication, low levels of confidence, lack of adequate preparation and corporate minimum 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.

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.