Note - This is an earlier post written when I was a faculty at Amity Business School, Amity University Haryana, now Gurugram, then Gurgaon, from 2011 to the end of 2013. I have edited it and published it again.
50 per cent of the faculties teaching MBA in business schools pan India should come from the industry. The other 50% would be for people with only academic experience. The normal. That’s only teaching experience in the classroom. Plus minimum marks. 50% threshold would be good from Class-X to PG.
A person with 5-years corporate experience would be eligible to apply for the post of Assistant Professor in any b-school.
A person with 10-years corporate experience is eligible for Associate Professor.
A person with 15-years corporate experience is eligible for Professor.
The above experiences are applicable to people who are applying for a faculty job after working in the industry for the minimum number of years referred to.
Ph.D. will never be a must for industry recruits. Otherwise there will not be any improvement. You will see the same thing happening over and over again in any b-school. An Assistant Professor is having 5-year experience, mostly academic, sitting beside a person having 20-years experience in the industry. He is also an Assistant Professor and both have the same salary. Poor chap is cursing himself why did he leave the industry.
Yes, I agree that a lot of motivation is required for people to leave the Industry with all its rewards and shift to teaching. People who have the passion to teach and contribute to institution-building are successful. But the point is monetarily they are always at a loss. If their experience is given adequate weightage they can contribute a lot to b-schools in particular. Doing PhD always remains an option with them but that should not negate what they bring to the institute.
The problem is private and even government business schools do not recognize and reward them. It is a fact that those moving from the industry to academia face discrimination and are always at a disadvantage. I have experienced it in private b-schools. I know how bad it feels. Obtaining a PhD is the be all and end all of life. Main clause. And the sub clause. How many papers have you written? How good you were in the industry or now as a faculty mean nothing. You go on teaching day after day. Become the best faculty. End of the story.
The quality of education imparted particularly in the MBA course depends on how well the faculty is able to correlate the concepts, whether it is finance, strategy, marketing, HR or operations, with applications in the industry. Applications at the workplace where the students will be moving on to. For a person who has never worked in an industry it becomes very difficult to do this. They cannot go beyond the text book. The students never learn much beyond what is given in the text book. And this has been the problem and general complaint of MBA students. The case studies which are compulsory in each subject should be from current business affairs. And definitely not from the text book. But herein lies the major flaw. If you do not have any idea of current business affairs how are you going to construct a recent case study?
But I agree that it all depends on the nature of experience and the intellectual ability and capacity. I agree that the regulator whether it is UGC/AICTE/concerned University needs to define the experience and what it wants from the people who come from the industry. It has to be evaluated by certain established parameters.
The b-school campus needs to welcome people from the industry if they are able to deliver.
To substantiate further, the following areas make such people the best to contribute positively in the growth of b-schools.
1. Industry interface: They can help immensely in the b-school's brand building. This is very much required in today's world of cut throat competition in education. They can assist the corporate resource cell. Whether it is the corporate connect program where they will be very useful in bringing the right people across verticals and domains who make the MBA students know right from Day-1 what is it that the company in particular and industry in general expect from them at the workplace. Employability is the thing that they look for.
2. Industry visits. Here also they can be better utilized with their experience.
3. Placements. Yes they are cut out for assisting in placements. This is an area of concern where even after having the resources things are not happening the way they should.
But all said and done they should have the passion to do these beyond teaching. Otherwise their experience will add little or no value to the students as well as to the b-school wherever they work.
People with industry experience are in a much better position to teach in b-schools is not an assumption. It is a fact. But having said that, teaching is not cut out for everybody. If a person does not have the passion to teach the number of years of corporate experience will not take care of that problem ever. At the same time preparing question papers, assessment of the students, how to guide them are all things which people learn as they teach. People who cannot speak for even 30 minutes do not deserve to work. Teaching is a much more difficult thing to do.
In the earlier part of this discussion I have suggested what should be the minimum industry experience that makes a person eligible for teaching in different posts.
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