An ‘Industry Relevant Manager’ is considered to be an agile professional equipped by B-Schools to effectively function in a technology-driven work environment. With a focus on recruiting industry-relevant personnel, the recruiters often recruit from outside the relevant industrial domain. Hiring people from another industrial domain has proven to be beneficial to a firm as they can think out-of-the-box while resolving business or strategic issues. Cross-industry hiring contributes to bringing people who can usher in new ideas consequently helping in enhancing the level of competitiveness of the firm.
Industrial Relevancy in the Post-pandemic World
The outbreak of the Coronavirus Crisis has deeply impacted the industrial environment. In fact, the pandemic has enhanced the value of Industry 4.0. A study carried out by McKinsey shows that firms that had scaled to the Industrial 4.0 environment, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, were found to better position themselves to counter the impacts of the crisis. On the contrary, the companies that failed to scale up to the Industrial 4.0 environment found themselves in a struggling position during the COVID-19 outbreak. To meet the objectives of scaling up to Industry 4.0, the firms are currently focusing on recruiting personnel possessing critical skills associated with Data Science and IoT engineering.
Industry Relevant Manager in the Industrial 4.0 Environment
The surge of companies scaling up the business to the Industry 4.0 environment will not only require industry-relevant managerial personnel with relevant knowledge and skills but also ones who can play a pivotal role in phasing out the transition. Thus, the managers will be required to develop a smarter workforce, based on providing quality training on critical skills and knowledge domains, for enabling an effective adaptation to the new technological and digital environment.
The core managerial competencies required for being industry-relevant in the digital environment are essentially divided into three main areas:
- Technical Competencies: It comprises different types of work-based knowledge and skills like coding, media skills, knowledge management, and also command over statistical tools. Managers need to acquire these skills on the basis of potential practice and learning of the tool skills. Research-enabled intelligence is also a core competency wherein the manager is required to tap into reliable study resources for enhancing the knowledge base to effectively adapt to changing business and technological environments.
- Managerial Competencies: An industry-relevant manager in the post-pandemic period should possess the needed managerial competencies associated with problem-solving and decision-making. Likewise, they should also possess conflict management skills and creativity for not only making quality decisions but also in dealing with subordinates using effective negotiation skills. The manager should be competent in identifying newer and untapped opportunities, critical thinking abilities in terms of interpreting data, analytical and decision-making skills.
- Social Competencies: Social Competencies are associated with the social values and motivational behavior reflected by the managerial personnel. The same tends to evaluate the level of interactivity carried out by the manager in dealing with his subordinates in the domains of knowledge transfer, leadership, and team management. It also encompasses competencies like social and emotional intelligence wherein the manager is required to effectively use non-formal platforms for driving employee engagement and developing creative insights and in empathizing with the needs of the subordinates respectively.
B-Schools’ shaping ‘Industry Relevant Managers’
Business Schools around the globe readily acknowledge the need for effective collaboration between the learning institutions and the industry at large for enhancing the parameters of skill development, acquisition, and thereby adoption of diverse knowledge resources based on innovation and technology transfer and finally to promote the growth of entrepreneurship skills.
With 20 years’ legacy of creating ‘industry relevant managers’, Globsyn Business School (GBS) – India’s only ‘Corporate B-School’ – has imparted ‘knowing’ skills through its structured pedagogy, while ‘doing’ and ‘being’ skills are propagated through its ‘Beyond Education’ activities. GBS fuses ‘Experiential Learning’ into its curriculum, in the form of Flipped Classroom, Case-based Learning, Live Projects, Role Plays and Industry Visits that exposes students to application-based learning. The B-School runs multiple industry-academia partnership initiatives like Corporate Connect sessions, Boardroom Simulations among others, which empower the young managers to gain crucial leadership & intrapreneurial skills – thus, shaping them into relevant managers for the corporate world from the day they graduate.
The post-pandemic world ushers in new challenges for both the businesses and the business schools to carry out their operations in a seemingly isolated manner. The industries and the B-Schools thereby are required to function in synergy to produce ‘industry-relevant managers’.