Great Lakes Institute of Management, whose campus sprung up on the picturesque East Coast Road on the fringes of Chennai, is 20 years old. Founded by the late Bala Balachandran, it had launched with a one-year MBA, which still remains its flagship programme. Dean Suresh Ramanathan says it’s a good time to reshape the B-school’s curriculum to produce future-ready managers, aligning with the rapidly evolving demands of today’s global business landscape. In this interview, he explains how Great Lakes reworked it and the batch undergoing this revised programme will graduate in 2025. “Our conversations with recruiters, alumni and industry leaders revealed a clear need for job-ready graduates who are adept at data-driven decision-making, cross-regional communication, and, most importantly, can demonstrate practical skills alongside theoretical knowledge,” he says. Excerpts from a conversation.

What insights made you revise the one-year programme?

It came from two or three different thoughts we were having as we were evaluating the programme. It’s been 20 years since we launched, it was conceived as an accelerated MBA; the proposition was maximising the money value of time. That was originally the launch premise and it worked well for all these years as there was only ISB and us. And as more schools got in, we thought about what can differentiate our one-year programme.

Students’ aspirations are different: some come in from tech and IT and want to move up the ladder within the same domain; and the second set of people want a career shift. We thought we should look at a differentiated PGP offering. We talked to recruiters and alumni and did some comprehensive research. There was an ‘aha’ moment, which was, most students who join our MBA programme have an average of 2-3 experience.

Once they rejoin the corporate sector, most organisations expect them to hit the road running and therefore they need a certain set of skills that is requisite for the job.

An organisation’s expectations are understandable. They hire for roles: consulting or product or project management or data analytics and such like. If these are the job roles they have in mind, what if we could equip the students with these skills so that they can hit the ground running, rather than them take only the core courses.

We made a shift in the way students choose electives and now they are ‘concentrations’ specific to job roles. If its product management we have a specific set of concentrations — we have seven sets of concentrations and we give students a choice of specialising in any, based on selection criteria, on background and experience.

What are these concentrations that you focus on?

There are seven concentrations: product and project management, consulting, data science, analytics, finance and fintech and marketing and business development. Earlier it was four areas of specialisations; they are still there. For anybody with weaknesses in these areas, we are working with them to improve. This approach allows students to specialise in two curated concentrations, combining depth of knowledge with practical skills that are directly relevant to the industry.

Did you work with industry to develop these hands-on courses?

We had a dialogue with 15-20 recruiters in various cities as well as with alumni and faculty experts. Recent alumni, particularly those who have been part of the workforce in the past five years, emphasised the importance of being able to apply learned tools and techniques immediately in the workplace. This feedback laid the foundation for a novel pedagogical change in the form of Lab Courses. These courses enable students to refine essential skills through hands-on learning, making them industry-ready from day one.

We realised that students don’t just need functional knowledge, so we incorporated experiential learning. These Labs focus on workplace skills, communication, handling, cleaning up data — everybody needs to know it — storytelling with data, an innovation sandbox, modelled on what top schools like Stanford are doing. The idea is to think of problems and come up with solutions which are out-of-the-box but logical and feasible. Creative problem solving is a skill that a lot of organisations need.

How will the concentrations you mention help the students?

They are not just taking the elective, they are also applying it. If there’s a go-to-market strategy or design thinking course, there will be labs where they will actually learn how to implement it. We have also co-opted companies to come in and help us with these things.

PayPal, for instance, is working with us on product management labs, we are taking their help in designing what is required. So we are confident that our graduates will have all the skills that are necessary when they enter the job market. In the existing system, people would specialise in finance and marketing and the recruiter would have to figure out where to fit this person. Now, we are giving them more skills rather than just functional knowledge.

The third piece we have added is mentorship. The revamped programme includes a structured student mentoring initiative. Each student is assigned a faculty mentor, meeting fortnightly to discuss academic progress, career goals and skill development. This mentorship fosters a strong connection between faculty and students, ensuring personalised guidance throughout the academic journey.