Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management & Technology, Bareilly, U.P.
Online published on 7 December, 2012.
The objective of management education is to groom the graduates for taking up executive responsibilities in organizations. The post-graduate management courses are, therefore aimed at on one hand, training the students to acquire necessary knowledge and, skills for various managerial functions and on the other grooming their personalities with pro-active attitude and a set of impactful human skills, including communication.
Another aspect of the post graduate programmes in management is that the students are adults. Their learning process and consequently the learning inputs are different in terms of their content, design and delivery. It has been experienced that the adult learning happens the best when they personally undergo the experience. It is always desirable that before they work on real issues with responsibility for the results, they have adequate feel of the real situations and issues. It is, therefore, essential to supplement conceptual teaching with a feel of real life and actual situations. Role-play and case-discussions have been found to be very useful. While carefully selected cases induce reality in the class discussions because of their origin from a real life happening, the role plays simulate a real-life situation and go beyond discussion to help the participants experience their own thought process, behaviors, reactions and performances.
