Bridging The Skill Chasm: An Analytical Analysis Of Industry-Academia Collaboration In Management Education And Corporates Within India

Abstract

In the emerging global market, the corporate needs highly skilled and talented employees to drive the business. In India, the higher education system contributes to this demand by providing a large volume of management graduates every year. However, it is challenging to make all these graduates employable with the skill sets required by the corporate. Only a holistic approach and efforts towards a perfect academic-industry collaboration can be made to address these issues. The main aim of this research is to identify the gaps in the importance given by academia-industry to the factors that influence job selection. This research also focuses on the gap in the importance given by management institutes and the corporate towards the employability skills that are to be possessed by management students to make them employable. It also focuses on finding out the co-relation of employability skills and its impact on campus placements of management students. Moreover, an attempt is made to explore various avenues of collaboration, and how management institutes can impart employability skills in the students to make them more employable working closely with corporate. The data was collected through structured questionnaires from management students and Human resource professionals from companies in the western zone of India. This research includes quantitative techniques by collecting numerical data and using statistical analysis to conclude. The result of the study showed that there exists a gap in the importance given to employability skills by the management institutes and the corporate. The result has significant implications for both stakeholders and gives various solutions to bridge the skill gap.