CLOSE to 300 business schools now exist in Pakistan. The number of business graduates produced by these schools keeps on increasing every year. Yet, not all the graduates land the employment of their choice in the skilled sector. Many end up switching careers by making a compromise to take jobs in customer service, sales and general office administration looking after admin, accounts and tax work. It is important to address the skills-job misfit and gap in academia and industry in terms of understanding the demands of modern day skills set and preparing the business graduates accordingly. To foster industry-academia linkage, some reforms are necessary in curriculum and pedagogy. These reforms centre on faculty development. The single-factor key performance indicator of published research in globally recognized indexed journals has not and will not lead attention towards local socio-economic issues and industry problems.
To get published in such globally indexed journals requires addressing a broader research problem taking global datasets which does not allow investigating the local issues more rigorously. Given the resource squeeze faced by the universities and HEC, it is also not easy to carry out multiple field studies on the local industry. To resolve this paradox, key performance indicators need to add social impact attributes, such as how many start-ups were mentored, how many corporate consultancies were provided and how many trainings or workshops were led by the faculty member.
It is not appropriate to have a single criterion of 10 or 15 HEC recognized publications for academic promotions with no regards to the research area and any social impact or even academic impact in terms of citations in top journals and academic awards for the research. To motivate practicality in pedagogy, it is important to introduce Professor of Practice and Teaching Apprenticeship positions in business schools. This will help in diversifying the knowledge base of faculty and reduce academia-industry gap as far as practical knowledge is concerned.
Industry academia linkage should neither be seen as an expense basket with topping up travel and logistics budgets, nor should it be pursued as a race to rack up the number of stale MoUs. Rather, it can be looked at as a way of diversified funding source. Extended and customized trainings are needed for small and medium enterprises, micro-enterprises and family businesses to help them scale up, get into formal sector, access more diverse source of finance, access global markets and improving service quality and packaging. This can help in establishing export oriented businesses and such scaled up enterprises with wide and sustainable source of revenues globally can potentially become the source of job placement of business graduates.
Currently, students are required to conduct a research as part of degree requirement. Many do not want to eventually become academics, yet they end up doing academic research supervised by academic faculty with limited industry exposure. Often, the topics are repetitive which provide no utility to the industry. Meaningful applied research with capstone projects shall be pursued rigorously and that is where, the role of Office of Research, Innovation and Commercialization (ORIC) becomes important. Focusing on these aspects and making them mandatory in program structure and delivery can bring quality in business education and also filter out the high-performing business schools from others.
Technology is a great enabler as we have seen in Covid-19 period. Many of the top business schools in the country have single campus in an urban area only. Even more than telecommunication and banking, education needs to be more inclusive. Besides encouraging opening campuses in small cities, online courses, webinars and podcasts need to be introduced to make education more inclusive and interactive. For greater outreach of academic research, podcasts on research and small documentaries on business cases can help in increasing outreach of academic and case study research by the faculty.
In the short run, security situation may not yet encourage foreign students to come physically to Pakistan for higher education like they used to be in the past, but, joint Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can be organized in collaboration with foreign universities to encourage more diverse learning and enrolments. Summer schools can be utilized as a vehicle to increase outreach and also developing all round skills in a business graduate to learn different arts and skills beyond the curriculum.
Finally, the curriculum needs to be skills-driven. It is better to introduce skills based outcomes besides course learning outcomes to create more focus on skills in outcomes based education. Having said that, even addressing these reasons is not enough. Recent trend shows that even the top business schools are not able to claim 100% job placement in relevant area in desired management position soon after graduation of their students. It is because of the general overall decline in economic activity. Due to the economic crisis and inconsistent policies with perverse incentives, the country is witnessing deindustrialization with trade taking more share in economy relatively as compared to value added manufacturing than in the past.
Though, we need improvement in business education to make it more relevant to industry demands, the industry itself also needs to embrace innovation and competition as well as think global and be export-driven. Trading can help in meeting local consumption needs, but to generate more exports, we need to venture in value added manufacturing. This requires political and economic stability, easily accessible energy as well as consistency in policies for a longer duration to bridge trust deficit between investors and the government. Thus, these suggested reforms in delivery of business education and economic policymaking can contribute to economic recovery.
—The author is Head of Postgraduate Studies at SZABIST University, Karachi, Pakistan.
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