While students excel in their classroom’s learning phases, when it comes to adapting to the requirements of the corporate world which they enter with great ambitions, they face challenges as there exists a huge gap between academic learning and real-world technicalities. To bridge that gap, alumni mentoring is playing a pivotal role, particularly in business schools, by providing a platform where the current batches get a first-hand learning overview of what the real world expects from them.
Experts delved deeper into what role alumni mentoring plays in providing students with a better understanding of the corporate world. Experts believe that by leveraging the experience and expertise of former students, these mentorship programmes offer invaluable guidance, career insights and networking opportunities for current students.
Feedback from alumni mentors
While alumni mentors bring with them loads of practical experiences which help the students to prepare themselves, they also have valuable inputs to share with the institutions regarding the areas that need improvement and what could be done more efficiently to equip the students with the corporate world’s requirements.
“The main thing that they talk about is how what we taught them is often not utilised. So, they sort of come back and tell us that. And it depends on how old the alumni is. If you talk to the younger alumni, what they tend to talk about is the skill gaps,” stated Nihar Amoncar, Director, School of Management, IILM University.
Amoncar further added, “What our alumni tell us is that we need to be more conscious about who recruits from us. So they say, you, as a b school that is 25 years old, know who your recruiters are. You know what kind of roles they are planning to offer. So you could have prepared us better. So what they're asking us to do is to be more intimate with the industry.”
Senior versus younger alumni mentors
Both, senior and recent pass-outs, offer distinct yet complimentary benefits to the educational institution. While senior alumni mentors bring years of professional experience, deep industry insights and strategic guidance, the younger ones connect with students through shared experiences of being recent graduates.
Experts believe that students tend to prefer the recent pass-outs more in comparison to the senior ones as they feel more connected to them. The current batches of students who get to interact with both kinds of mentors usually have a slight tilt towards their recent seniors.
“When we mediate engagement with the current students, we have seen that our students are more open to listening to the younger alumni because they relate to them better. They're just a few years senior to them, maybe three years, four years, five years at the most. So they kind of bring much more credibility, because they can say that we have been there, we have done that very recently and we were like you just a few years back. And this is what we have done once we got out into the corporate world. So they take their advice much more seriously than any advice a very, very senior alum gives them,” stated Himadri Das, Director General, International Management Institute (IMI).
Evolving ways of alumni engagement
As times have changed, institutes are adopting various new approaches to help their students get the most out of alumni mentorship programmes. Apart from the traditional reunions, now they are taking the route of digital platforms, mentorship programmes and industry collaborations to create a framework which delivers more impactful and effective results.
“We try to engage them in the first semester itself. There is a wish that every student, every MBA student get one alumni as a mentor. Unfortunately, it is not happening. So, what we try and do is we identify a set of five students who have similar interests in the area of, let's say, HR. Then we identify an alumni who is working in that area and we reach out to them,” highlighted Smitha Viswanathan Girija, Dean and Professor, School of Management, GD Goenka University. She added, “We ask the students to get engaged with them on LinkedIn and other platforms. If they are not responding, we help them to get connected. The first meeting is formally arranged by the university and then we leave it to the students.”
On the aspect of evolution in engagement with alumni, Meha Mathur, Senior Associate Editor, BW Businessworld, who moderated the session at BW Education Future of Management Education Conclave 2024, stated, “Typically we hear in the case of IITs and IIMs, alumni giving endowments, chairs being set up. So that's a way of connecting with your alumni, even maybe 20, 25 years down the line.”
Experts stressed that strong alumni mentorship programmes help students practice skills that make them stand out in interviews, leading them to perform better during their placements as well.
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