Stepping Into The Future

With the rapid technological transformation, the nature of office work is becoming digitised and intelligent. So how are B-schools preparing their students for the future?

- Navneel Maji

THE CONVENTIONAL view of regular work is witnessing a significant transformation. Organizations are now looking for people who are efficient in technology that is intuitive, powerful and aligned to their needs. According to Gartner, by 2020, the greatest source of competitive advantage for 30 percent of organizations will come from the workforce’s ability to creatively exploit digital technologies. The growing businesses have started realizing that it is their workers, who are enabling them to create and innovate further.

Every year, around 360,000 MBA students graduate from 4,000 B-schools in India, according to data from the All India Management Association. However, only 60 per cent of these graduates find jobs. B-schools are the passage to the job market to the lakhs of people. Any deprivation in the ability to partake knowledge to the students with the existing course structure can fall short to meet the demands of the current work structure in the job market. Hence, the challenge is to catch up with the fast-changing trends of the job market demand.

The need of the hour is B-schools should make efforts to leverage technology to improve the academic environment and increase access to education. The B-schools have to make deliberate efforts to revise and revamp the portfolio of courses and make them relevant for the technology and knowledge-driven business world. AI, mobile, social media and IoT are driving data complexity in the corporate world. Business schools cannot ignore such development anymore.