Prakash has over 28 years of professional experience across several domains like technology, sales, marketing, assessment, and corporate relations & people management and has successfully handled large teams with proficiency in motivating team members.

This article has been written with a view to explain how fresh out of University students can be made industry ready to create and secure a career path for them. The article explains various initiatives that can be taken, while the students are still doing their courses, to prepare them for being productive and groom them so that they imbibe practical aspects and increase the worth of the degrees they pass out with. The article takes into account the experience of the author during his tenure in placing students in some of the large corporates, mid-sized companies and start-ups in India and abroad. Various insights from formal and informal communication with corporates and alumni of institutes have been taken to derive inputs from their experiences, understandings and success stories. Also, a very momentous aspect of understandings from Industry leaders on what they expect from fresh University graduates has been taken into account.

Post Pandemic – How Things have Changed
The pandemic has shown us a never-before challenge: The ability to respond to unforeseen circumstances and the need to evolve quickly to find solutions to problems that on no occasion existed before. This has in fact made the need to bridge the gap between industry and academia even more. While pre-pandemic industry readiness just meant ‘billable at the earliest’, the post-pandemic world requires employees to think on their feet and respond to strange circumstances all this in a short period. This enhances the need of the academia being closer to understanding the industry requirements and constraints and prepare their students for the same.

What can the Academia do Differently?
The academia has typically responded to this requirement by some steps such as Guest lectures by Corporate leaders, organizing conclaves and conferences, discussing curriculum and making changes in consultation with the industry, and so on. While these are welcome initiatives, these are more or less baby steps to accomplish a long journey.

With the need of the hour, a few more suggestions could be as follows:
1. Mandatory Practitioner Sessions:Each course that is being taught in the classroom should have at least 25 percent of the course being covered by someone from the industry who is/has worked in that domain. Essentially this means that while the concerned faculty covers most of the theoretical aspects, someone from the industry chips in with relevant practical information. Doing this for every course that a student undergoes will help him/ her tremendously in being prepared for the corporate world.

2.Faculty with Industry Experience: Not many faculty members have a realtime exposure to working in a Corporate. Academia being open to people from the industry coming and teaching full-time will help the cause. Due weight age can be given to the industry

experience of a prospective faculty. Exemptions from a necessary PhD degree can be given to professionals having a certain work experience as their experience can quite substantiate.

3.Students Encouraged Working on Live Projects: Industry partners and recruiters can be approached by academia to provide live projects to students while they are still learning. These may be part time live projects that a student can undertake along with his/her studies.The various opportunities and solutions that the post-pandemic world has created in the form of on line delivery will make it easier for the academia as well as the industry to adopt this.

An industry mentor can be the best guide and friend for a student in not only helping them making future-ready, but also in various aspects such as choosing their specializations and subjects and also nurture their innate business potential

4.Mentorship of Students by Industry Leaders: Industry leaders can volunteer to be mentors to students when they are still studying. An industry mentor can be the best guide and friend for a student in not only helping them making future-ready, but also in various aspects such as choosing their specializations and subjects and also nurture their innate business potential. Through such initiatives, students will be able to understand roles, responsibilities and challenges of a particular career path. This would also help them fine tune their expectations and evaluate their fitment.

5.Competitions Organized by Corporates: Various corporates have taken the initiative of organizing practical competitions for students. These competitions are mostly designed to test the cognitive and problem solving ability of students by making them explore a real life corporate scenario. Apart from having incentives like prize money and PPO options to the top performers, such competitions help develop a competitive and team spirit amongst young students. They are able to understand the challenges that they may be facing in the corporate world and prepare themselves better. The training and placement cells of Universities and Institutes should facilitate the participation of their students in such competitions and faculty members can guide the students how to perform well in them.

Knowing the Purpose – the Most Important Step towards Bridging the Gap
It is important for both industry and academia to know the purpose of the above described and any other initiatives that can be taken to bridge the gap. Broadly the purpose could be three-fold:

1.Developing business acumen in students by exposing them to integrated understanding as against functional expertise.
2.Enhance cognitive skills of students by exposing them to real-life problems & issues faced by the industry
3.Nurturing communication & inter personal skills of students by making them interact with various industry people of different organizations.

Three Important Stakeholders
To arrive at a solution, it is important to understand the three important stakeholders of this process. They are Students, Academia and the Industry. Any initiative without aligning all three stakeholders will not work. A solution can come with the stakeholders understanding the need and show willingness and each one of them contributing their bit to bridge the gap.