Not just the current batch, we aim to provide job opportunities to our alumni, Director IES MCRC

In a conversation with Shiksha.com, Director-IES Management College and Research Centre Dr Vijay Bhangale talks about the teaching methodology of the institute in detail. He shares all possible opportunities that are offered to students to help them become more confident and industry-ready. This includes three months of internship opportunities, live projects under the mentorship of industry professionals, self-learning programmes, industrial visits, mock group discussions and Personal Interview sessions.

Dr Bhangale has over four decades of collective experience in the industry, academia, research and administrative sectors. He has also conducted training programmes for the executives of many companies such as ACC, Crompton Greaves, TATA Liebert, Vikram Ispat, Global Telesystems, and Technova Imaging Systems.

Read the excerpts of the interview below:

Q: What are the three things that your institute is doing that will enable it to differentiate itself from the competition?

A: We, at IES, believe that a degree in management is not merely an academic degree or qualification. A good management programme should focus on the overall development of students. This is not possible if more focus is on classroom teaching. Lessons in management must be learnt from the activities that happen outside the classrooms, too. We also are of the view that the emphasis should be laid on giving opportunities to students to test their skills of applying theoretical learning into practice. Our entire pedagogy has been designed with this focus.

Apart from the technical or conceptual skills, the corporate world looks for leadership and team skills in management graduates. We identified that very early and gave special attention to this need. We have designed a module to inculcate these skills in our students. The module focuses on experiential learning because theoretical lessons in leadership and teamwork would be of little help. Therefore, through this module, the students are exposed to different situations in which they can test their leadership and team skills. This module also gives them an opportunity of identifying good leaders and team players from their batch mates.

Self-dependence and self-reliance is another quality a management graduate should possess. We give an opportunity to our students to earn 12 credits through self-learning courses. This is a unique feature of our curriculum. While selecting self-learning courses students are at liberty to choose what they want to learn not only through study and exams but also by taking up projects, research work, community engagement, industry interaction and study abroad.

Q: What are the top three initiatives undertaken by you that are helping your students become more industry-ready?

A: We try to give highest possible industry exposure to our students so that when they take up their first job they don’t encounter surprises. We migrated from the conventional two-month summer internship projects to three months. This gives an opportunity to our students to get a longer exposure to the real world. We encourage our students to take up more live projects. This also allows them to work with industry professionals. Each of the faculty members gets at least one or two industry professionals to talk to students as part of their course. This helps our students to relate theory with practice because industry persons share their real-world experiences. We also organise many industry visits for our students. Through these visits, they understand the processes followed by the industry.

We work hard to improve the employability of our students to make them industry-ready. A special emphasis is given to train students in soft skills which again is in great demand with industry by holding special sessions to improve their communication skills and report writing skills. These sessions also include training in business etiquette, dressing and grooming. We also organise sessions and some activities to keep our students abreast of what is happening around them specifically in the field of business and economy.

To ensure that the industry is convinced with the capabilities of our students we organise multiple practice sessions for our students to train them in group discussion and interview skills. Our faculty members spend a lot of time on this activity. Finally, to help students make the right decisions about choosing their career path we have a well-established mentoring system. Apart from regular mentoring we also have a special mentoring system to help bright students to do something exceptional and relatively weak students to come up to the desired level. 

Q: What are the key attributes that a student should have in order to qualify for your institution and get top grades?

A: Apart from a good score in the prescribed entrance test such as CAT, CET, XAT, GMAT, CMAT, MAT and ATMA, the candidate should have a good scholastic record. We generally prefer that candidates should have scored at least an aggregate of 60 per cent throughout their educational journey. We also see the quality of statement of purpose (SoP) written by them in the application form.

They should be above average in academics, have good written and oral communication skills, be regular in attending lectures and participating in all the co-curricular activities and most importantly should show have positive attitude towards the programme.       

Q: Which programmes would you say are your best? What is it that helps your institution differentiate itself for this programme?

A: We offer three programmes, Master of Management Studies (MMS), Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) and PGDM in Pharmaceutical Marketing. We are proud of all the three programmes. However, because of the factors of enjoying or sacrificing autonomy, we are able to do a lot of experiments with our PGDM program. This gives us the opportunity to offer the current knowledge to our students. Also, we are able to incorporate many activities in the structure which give opportunities to our students to get exposed to the real world. Most of the features mentioned earlier relate to our PGDM programme and that helps us differentiate ourselves from others.

Q: What are you doing to improve/drive better campus placements for your current students and alumni? What kind of jobs routinely come to campus? What would you say are the key recruitment trends for your college (observed over the past five years)?

A: For our current batch of students, there is a dedicated placements department consisting of three full-time staff members. They are assisted by a high-level placement committee consisting of Director, Associate Dean and a Chief Mentor. Also, there is a placements coordination team of students.

We are strong in industry interaction, including relations with some foreign multinationals. This allows us to invite many companies to our campus for final and summer placements. Our database has more than 300 companies as regular visitors to our campus.

We make all possible efforts to help our students show their potential when the recruiting companies visit our campus.

Generally, our students are placed in prominent sectors, including BFSI, retail, FMCG, logistics and supply chain, pharmaceuticals, media, and equity research and analysis.

The trend during the last five years did not see any drastic change in terms of job profiles and industry sectors. However, there has been an improvement in the number of companies visiting us and the salary packages offered. On average, we see nearly eight per cent increase every year in the salary packages offered to our students.

Along with current batch students we also provide job opportunities to our alumni. There is a dedicated alumni portal which is interactive. Whenever we get requirements from companies for candidates with nearly five years of experience, we post those requirements on the alumni portal. Even alumni themselves can post job requirements in their companies. Thus, apart from the College the alumni also get help from each other.