CAT and management courses Dr Jitendra K Das, director, FORE School of Management, New Delhi, explains how the academic world is reacting to new demands from the business community

CAT and management courses

Dr Jitendra K Das, director, FORE School of Management, New Delhi, explains how the academic world is reacting to new demands from the business community

The world economy, especially Europe, is giving jitters with every passing day as it tries to come to terms with the universal truth as to how to manage. At the same time India is growing at a healthy rate. This makes India a favourable destination for investments. We at FORE School of Management, New Delhi take this in a positive way as we nurture and produce management talent that will proactively participate in the business as it throws out new challenges. We pertinently ask the question, how is the academic world reacting to the new demands? All the decisions that a business executive makes culminates in the shaping of the future of the organization as well as the society at large. The manager's ability to take decisions in the best possible manner out of the options available leading to the overall satisfaction of all the stakeholders is what we at FORE consider at the time of facilitating the content of the management programs. This is actually the essence of our guiding principle to make our graduating students relevant to the corporate world. The Institute's mission is to provide contextual learning that helps in the holistic development of students and help equip them to face the challenges as corporate leaders. At FORE we are driven by employers demand and we shape up our students in such a way that they become more sought after by the recruiters. The very fact that about three-fourth of the students admitted to FORE have engineering background can be seen as a direct reflection of the impact of successful candidates taking the Common Admission Test (CAT) in general. CAT is one of the strong component in the criteria for admissions to the two-year full time management programs at FORE. It is generally stated that an MBA education makes a person skillful to get optimum output from limited resources. Though, nature has not given everything in abundance yet we have to optimize our output, so we teach how to get effective business solutions with limited resources. Today organizations are demanding highly skilled MBA graduates with lots of analytical abilities hence, students must ensure to map it on the requirements of different industries. We at FORE feel that getting jobs at graduation level is useful but feel that candidates must go for management education after getting a work experience of one or two years because it will help them to adapt what is being taught at B-Schools in much better way. We also expect future MBA aspirants to stay cool and think cool, not to rush to do MBA just because others are doing. The aspirants are motivated to do SWOT analysis for themselves and ensure that they have made themselves up a stuff of hard nut to get ready for cracking at corporate world. It is very interesting to note that generally there is a very poor connection between CAT Scores and academic performance of a student in PGDM program whether in topline business schools or IIMs. That is, a high CAT scorer is not necessarily always a topper in the PGDM program. The recruiters never look at the CAT Score. So, therefore CAT Score is to be counted as an entry to topline business schools and IIMs, and it is not a score that measures academic depth of students. Therefore, at FORE we are always trying to lower the weightage of CAT score in the selection criteria and include other components for assessing candidates.