According to a study published by the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co, the senior management of most companies have revealed that as many as 45% of the positions are vacant because they are unable to find people with the right skills. How can this growing gap between what the corporates want and what the management graduates are able to offer be bridged? Dr Balakrishna Grandhi (Dean – Global MBA & Master of Global Business and Professor of Marketing & Strategy, SP Jain) shares his ideas in Business World Education and Brainfeed Higher Education Plus Magazine.
The article highlights the challenges faced by organisations, the skills that make a graduate relevant in the 21st-century workforce and the imminent need to reinvent management education.
Dr Grandhi writes, “With the advent of the fourth revolution, an employee with fair digital literacy with an understanding of key emerging platforms, and how can they be utilised to address the customers' evolving needs, has become a necessity. Companies are also inundated with large volumes of data from across different media, at a high speed, the reliability of which is often not known. Organisations, therefore, look at hiring employees comfortable with new-age technologies, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. Ability to engage in descriptive analytics, i.e., looking at patterns in data collected; predictive analytics, i.e., understanding how a particular segment may behave is also a necessity.”