Amit Bansal, CEO and co-founder, Purpleleap, speaks with Shalini Saksena about the need for a more professional approach to education
What are the steps required to reduce the void between academia and corporatesIJ
The obvious solution is to include more of industry oriented practical exposure to students while they are still in the college. While in design, lot of universities have included an industrial training or practical project work as part of the final year curriculum. But the problem is in implementation, it is very weak.
What are the problems with tier II and III level collegesIJ
Putting the checks in place will lead to a collapse of the commercialisation around tier III colleges. Most of these colleges are just getting admissions for the purpose of distributing an engineering degree instead of imparting quality education. There is a huge commercial pressure on the universities to ensure that the exam system caters to the need for an easy to run engineering college.
Measures needed to ensure uniformity in B-schoolsIJ
Different B-schools across the world follow different approaches but they need to ensure that the quality is high. To ensure high quality of output, the system needs to ensure two aspects:
How does one make management graduates employment-readyIJ
Management education in tier II-III colleges is predominantly still following the curriculum meant for middle to senior management in organisations (having topics like mergers, corporate strategy, brand management and market research). The skills required to do well in the area of business development are hardly covered.
How does one enroll with PurpleleapIJ A few courses that he can should opt forIJ
We tie-up with the college and invest in setting up a VSAT enabled multi-media learning infrastructure inside the college. All the students of the partner colleges can participate in Purpleleap programmes.
Some of our programmes in engineering are software engineer, infrastructure management engineer, telecom engineer, embedded design and testing engineer, mechanical design engineer and robotics engineer.
Benefits for taking such coursesIJ
The student acquires both the technical and soft-skills required for a particular entry-level role making the fitment for the role extremely high. The companies get the advantage of getting a candidate that is ready for an entry-level role and does not require the typical three-four months of training.
Some training methods involvedIJ
The training is focused on providing a practical exposure using the tools and processes that industry uses for a role. We provide the context of the usage of the technology through experts from the industry by leveraging VSAT technology to get a real-time two way communication between our studios and college students in our multi-media classrooms inside the college.
Where is corporate India lackingIJ
The corporate world is not able to fill the available positions with the right talent. The main reason is that the institutes are unable to keep pace with the demands of the industry.
There are many institutes that try to fill the shortage gap. Where do you standIJ
The basic difference is the approach. We work with the colleges to ensure that the students get the industry exposure and get ready for their first job along-with their regular curriculum study during four years of engineering or two years of MBA.
The students get 50 hours of skill development intervention and industry exposure per semester and start as early as second semester going up to final year.