CRAFTING INDUSTRIAL VISITS

More or less every management institute organizes industrial visits for management students. The visits limit themselves to plant visits in most of the cases. A routine process is followed where students attend a power point presentation primarily by human resource department of the particular company and then visit the manufacturing plant. Given the busy schedule, academic institutes should be thankful to industry for this additional of time. These visits add bare minimum to industry in terms of advertisement and branding. Most of the companies consider these visits under their Corporate Social Responsibility Program. They treat it as a gap bridging exercise between corporate and academia. Under the constraint of time, we as academicians should strategically craft these visits for maximum benefit of the students. Five key inputs in strategically organizing industrial visit can be;

• Visit should be with a small group of students (not more than 20). A smaller group provides high learning opportunity with administrative convenience and individual attention. Small number also ensures sensible interaction.
• One exercise eventually is to make students do a lot of groundwork before they go to visit about the particular industry. By doing so the PowerPoint presentation session can be converted in to interactive session where management students can ask questions related to marketing strategies, supply chain mechanism, HR policies and operational strategies.
• A pre visit session should be conducted to observe students’ preparation. Faculty can guide the students about ways to explore more about the particular industry.
• After completion of visit a session should always be conducted by faculty expert in order to ensure learnings from the visit.
• Every visit should end up with a learning outcome presentation. Students should be asked to present key learnings in the group.

If the industry visit is crafted with the help of these heads, the outcome of the visit will always add to students’ knowledge. These organized visits can definitely bridge the gap between theory and practice.

DR B K SOM

Associate Professor

JIMS ROHINI SEC - 5