SMOT Blog

With the very first set of students of PGPM entering the career track specialization phase from the 8th of September, SMOT has come through a full circle; Foundation to Functional to Career - a well thought out and thoroughly over-hauled program to meet the most challenging business demands of the day.

The career phase starts with an intensive 36 hour Executive Workshop in Management Consulting anchored by an internally accredited Executive Management Coach from Canada - Mr. Kevin Schwenkar. This is followed by a 36 hour Virtual Class Room based mentored sessions where in the students will make presentations in their respective career track specializations.

Students also do a project / internship anchored by subject matter experts both from academia and industry. The rest of the credits, equal to 108 hours, are devoted to imparting the most essential career specific knowledge, skills and soft skills.

For example, to put it a little more structurally, the student who wants to specialize as Business Analyst must

Know what are business processes, engineer and re-engineer them, be knowledgeable in various types of business cases, be in a position to understand the organic and technical nature of the business cases, be in a position to evaluate the business value of IS of various business cases, know how to model the IS, know project estimation, resources and pricing, know different types of business analytics and tools, know business intelligence, know business development strategies, have understanding of project management, IT Services Consulting, Account Management,  Sales Collaterals and Ethical Consulting. These apart, students also get sufficient grounding in negotiations, presentation skills, documentation skills etc. - all these on the soft side.

Thus, SMOT’s highly talented academic council members have developed curriculum for each career track specialization. This approach has given enough room to identify the most essential skills and knowledge and package them with appropriate weight.

Accreditation is a term loosly used in the context of ‘approval’ from the competent authority of the Government. In so far as the Management Programs are concerned, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is the competent authority in India to accord approval to a management program being proposed by a private party or a Government body. For a program to be approved, AICTE stipulates several requirements, both for academics and infrastructure. One of the requirements is that the program proposed should have a span of two years. There is a tendency among the manageement schools these days to offer programs of different durations - such as 12 month, 16 month and 18 month. The 12-month program has gained a lot popularity in the recent past. Going by the way these ‘accelerated’ programs are conducted, there does not seem to be any compromise on the credit requirements - they aparently meet the international standards on the minimum credit requirements. It is just that they do not give any vacation, time table with a lot leisure time etc..According to them, the students joining such accelerated programs start earning 12 months ahead of others thus moving up the ladder in their career path even earlier. Probably, more suited to experienced candidates, such programs have a gained acceptance from the recruiting companies also. 

Many Business schools believe that business and management education can not be viewed straight jacketed, within the narrow parameters of just yet another academic program. Broadly, any higher level educational program should allow room for structural and curricular changes with a lot of possibilities for innovations in faculty deployment, students in take and offering support services.

While it is important that a certain level of control on the programs is necessary, it is also equally important to allow entrepreneurial institutions to experiment with new ideas and innovations; even if it amounts to going out of the way to help, the authorities might very well consider doing so.