On the brave new world of the management graduates of 2020

Education has reached a sort of pinnacle in quantity, in India. The growth of the number of business schools and engineering colleges has been disproportionately high in the last two decades. With a huge build-up of supply of seats, the ease to get into these institutions has become an open road. The new reality is that the institutions are now making it easy for students to seek admission – that is to euphemistically say that they are falling over each other to get students.

- Rajesh Nair

It is the strangest of times! Uncertainty is not just a prism through which we had to look at the future. It is now, more of a windowpane to the present day. Every day is another cloud of questions. Our intuitive decisions from the collective experience of the past does not equip us to make daily and otherwise quotidian choices. The pressures are also a clarion call for immediate tactical actions. There is no time to mull over choices nor is there a body of ‘do it yourself ’ texts we can refer to. For the young management graduate, who is entering the portals of a career, it is a challenging time!

For them, it is a key moment in life where exciting possibilities and optimism meet uncertainty and change. It is at one level filled with hope, exhilarating and yet a testing time. This generation will be the ones who end up navigating a fascinating yet scary scenario. How much change can one tolerate? How much change orientation will be needed? What are the professions that will find their way to the roster of exciting opportunities? Perhaps amidst all these questions, it is also best to lie low, think more, keep faith in moments of great change. We all have the instinct to buckle down and cling to the familiar, what we know, what seems pragmatic, the things we’re comfortable with – there is nothing wrong with that! But it is also an opportunity to keep looking beyond the horizon. The reactive nature of the times will confuse the responses. A good framework to think forward is NOW, NEXT, and BEYOND. What can we do now, how should we plan the next phase and what lies in the future beyond. At the end of it, we should always focus on moving forward one step at a time! As the saying goes, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”