Business schools must move beyond subject silos

What may be becoming obsolete is the assumption that choosing one is enough to prepare someone for a career

Every year, thousands of young Indians enter MBA classrooms and choose between Finance, Marketing, Operations and HR. There is good reason for this. Business decisions require domain knowledge. You cannot exercise sound financial judgement without understanding finance, build a credible brand without understanding consumers, or make good people decisions without understanding organisations and human behaviour. The issue with MBA specialisations is not that they are irrelevant. The problem is that they are not sufficient.

The world our graduates are entering is increasingly problem-oriented rather than discipline-based. A finance professional might find themselves analysing data, engaging with technology, assessing risk or communicating with senior executives. A marketer increasingly operates at the intersection of consumer insights, data, technology and commercial strategy. An HR professional must understand people as well as productivity, data and the impact of AI.

Despite the continued need for expertise, careers are increasingly multidisciplinary.

This poses a different challenge for management education. We need to continue building strong disciplinary foundations while also teaching students how to transfer what they learn into new contexts. This is even more important in the age of AI.

AI can retrieve information and generate analysis quickly, but speed is not expertise. Evaluating AI still requires deep knowledge to ask the right questions, spot gaps and judge accuracy. Domain expertise, therefore, remains essential.

Meanwhile, knowledge alone cannot be the endpoint of management education. Employers ultimately assess graduates through what they can do: the problems they can frame, the decisions they can make, the tools they can use, the people they can work with and how quickly they can learn when circumstances change.

Business schools, therefore, need to move beyond the traditional equation of subjects + courses + specialisation = career readiness.

This thinking led us to create FIIBX, a capability system that sits across our PGDM. While students continue to develop disciplinary depth, learning is also organised around career pathways: Consulting & Business Transformation, Revenue & Growth, Finance, Operations & Analytics, People & Organisation, and Founders & Ventures.

The distinction is deliberate. A pathway does not replace a discipline. It asks a different question: not just what have you studied, but what are you becoming capable of doing with what you have studied?

This means giving students exposure to industry, opportunities to make decisions with incomplete information, experience in applying AI thoughtfully, cross-functional collaboration and ways to demonstrate capabilities through work rather than examinations alone.

It also changes what we should assess. If tests primarily reward recall, students will optimise for recall. If they reward polished outputs, generative AI can increasingly produce those outputs. But if we assess how students frame problems, interrogate evidence, challenge AI recommendations, reconcile competing perspectives and defend solutions, we begin to measure something closer to managerial capability.

The relationship between AI and management education, therefore, cannot simply be about adding AI courses to an existing curriculum, nor about dismantling disciplines.

The more important question is how we combine depth, breadth and application. Students need depth because judgement without knowledge becomes superficial. They need breadth because business problems rarely respect disciplinary boundaries. And they need the capability to apply both because careers will continue to evolve long after the knowledge acquired during an MBA has changed. The MBA specialisation is not becoming obsolete. What may be becoming obsolete is the assumption that choosing one is enough to prepare someone for a career.

The writer is the President & CEO, Fortune Institute of International Business (FIIB); Views presented are personal.