Premier skills-testing agency MeritTrac has just concluded, after testing 790 B-school graduates in six cities on seven key parameters, that 77 per cent of them are “unemployable”. Heads of some top B-schools say this finding doesn’t surprise them. “The industry is employing more and more students and finding later that many of them are not worth recruiting,” said IIM-Bangalore Director Prakash Apte.

The anomaly runs deeper. Every year India Inc needs some 1,28,000 MBAs — 2,000 as CEOs and the rest at other levels. There are 1,257 B-schools recognised by the All-India Council for Technical Education turning out only 70,000 MBAs. MeritTrac’s study sample covered this “recognised” talent pool and found that only 23 per cent of them were of employable quality.

The situation is alarming, all such facts relate to one’s definition of being highly qualified…many prospects would not even have idea about the opportunities and avenues of beyond being a MBA, as this is a new measure for getting into corporate domains…it’s almost being treated as the defacto? Almost all corporates job hunters pass on the Job descriptions which mention MBA as perquisites making it a commodity for the job market….

Surprisingly many BE’s and BA’s are getting into job which does not use anything from what they have been rutting out while their stints in the B-schools and engineering collegues..

The institutions getting into the MBA production are seriously loosing quality as the premium institutions are either beyond reach or have hefty fees making them not the obvious choice. The strata has no choice but to get into the next available lot of political run/embalmed institutions making business out of this need. The lot many students then land up with the ‘MBA’ label but are severely below the so called ‘acceptable MBA benchmark’ ..adding them to the social worst case scenario!

There are ample incidences we come across of specialized engineers doing the most irrelevant jobs, work not even close to their area of specialization…like a chemical / polymer engineer completing MBA in finance and doing a software testing for an embedded software…I mean getting into the ‘role’ traps of successful career may not emerge only being an MBA and BE, it is time for corporate houses ( being the demand generators) and aspirants to relook at their career ladder and validate it with the learning opportunities and other avenues…