Sometime back I wrote a post regarding the mushrooming of engineering and management colleges in India and how reforms in education (which are making setting up of such colleges easier everyday) are not helping the students in the long run. Most of the students of such tier II and III MBA colleges remain unemployed or get jobs which are not suited to their degree. Unemployability of MBAs has become a trend, a trend so obvious and so common that it now makes business sense to invest in making them employable and courses, commonly called the Bridge courses have come up in the market for just this purpose. While many restrict themselves to teaching communication skills to MBA students, some recognize other missing factors in the MBA education and try to fix them up. Almost all of them aim to make the MBA student ‘job ready’.

What exactly is ‘job ready’? and what are the missing elements in the MBA education that restrains the students from finding a job? is a matter of great deliberation. ‘Elements Akademia’ , a finishing school in Gurgaon researched and found out eight areas where students lack, namely Attitude, Business Communication, Grooming/Personality/Confidence, Corporate Exposure, Domain Knowledge, Sales and Customer Service, Basic Managerial Skills and Ethics.

As communication skills is the most evident problem and one that requires least infrastructure set up for training , grooming centers are also run by coaching centers along with their CAT preparatory classes. The focus of all such classes being personality development of the candidate so that he can be recruited by corporate organizations and is able to work in a corporate environment. The T.I.M.E center in Hyderabad provides training in resume making, presentation skills and also in computers above their communication and personality development course. Career Launcher in Bombay runs a program known as ‘Speak Easy’ which is for the students enrolled for the CAT preparatory classes and focuses on oral and written communication skills and group discussion and interview skills.

The course at T.I.M.E is designed for a duration of anything between 20 hours to 100 hours which is customized according to the needs of the students. The duration might also change depending on where the classes are being imparted (in the campus of the MBA college or in T.I.M.E center).

Elements Akademia has designed a 240 hour curriculum to train the students on the various qualities listed above which is imparted over a period of six months. The content for the training , according to them has been developed by industry experts in a particular domain. For example, the module for grooming has been designed by Lo’real and for selling and customer service skills by Max New York Life Insurance. They also provide industry interaction or live industry projects for some selected students. According to the CEO, Nishant Saxena, most of the students in the institute are from the belt of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chattisgarh and Orissa.

How much do these courses help the students is yet to be known. While the finishing school institutions make tall claims about their students’ development, the reality is not all that rosy. While most of the students agree that the bridge courses helped them “gain some confidence and improved their communication skills”, they believe they still have a long way to go. Ana Rizvi, a student of Business School Of Delhi, Greater Noida and a student of Elements Akademia is “satisfied” with the course, although she thinks that it could have been better if the promised interview classes and industry interactions would have also taken place. However, she says,”it did help me and my classmates in many ways”.

The industry for finishing schools or personality development courses is growing (at around 20 percent annually). It might be good news to find one more area to provide jobs, however, it is a direct indication to a glaring hole in the MBA education system in the country and one that shouldn’t be ignored. As Vidya, a student of Badruka School of Management, Hyderabad and a student of the T.I.M.E personality development course says, “It would have been the best thing if we had such courses as part of the curriculum at our MBA school as a continuous learning program. How much does a 30 or a 40 day class help?”