Importance of communication skills in professional courses

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Importance of communication skills

By Sadanand Meher

Today, stringent competition has made it difficult for students and parents to make perfect career decisions. The world now offers a wide range of study options which add to the confusion of students and parents. While people undertake research to find a suitable course to pursue, it has been observed that they generally neglect considering a vital aspect while analysing the available courses i.e. communication. Language proficiency, communication proficiency, and personality development are as important as domain knowledge in any stream of study. Just knowing the content is not enough for a student if he/she is not able to express or articulate his thoughts when needed.

It has been observed that the colleges and universities offering professional courses like B.Tech, MBA/PGDM, MCA etc. generally neglect communication as a component. Of course, some of the institutions are serious about maintaining quality education but unfortunately this seriousness is confined to the core subjects. A close look at the English syllabus of professional institutions, especially that of Odisha, reveals that very few institutions are serious about communicative excellence of the students. This negligence leads to a situation where qualified engineers, PGDM holders, MBAs, and MCAs keep struggling for jobs as they lag behind in competition because of their communicative deficiency. This situation is particularly true of MBA colleges in Odisha. However, there are few colleges which take this issue seriously and stress on excellence in both core subjects as well as language.   

Asian School of Business Management (ASBM), one of the leading Management colleges in Odisha, is an example of such institutions that are serious about nurturing the holistic skills of students, where quality delivery of domain knowledge and excellent training in communication skills are given equal importance. ASBM has a concept like “Finishing School”, which is used to nurture language skills of the students and to groom their personality to make them polished professionals. The language proficiency and personality development courses under this Finishing School are meant to give a finishing touch to an individual’s personality. This course adds feathers of communication, helping students to become smart and market-ready. The present competitive scenario raises the need of teaching/training modules which can take care of personality development, communicative proficiency, and knowledge and finally lead the students to better placement. Moreover, we are in an era where role of an institution does not end with getting the students placed. It is high time to equip the students with work-related skills so that the students can relate the imparted skills with practical challenges and excel at workplace without fumbling.

Today those management institutions are flourishing which are always careful about producing efficient managers with communicative excellence as proficiency in English language is as necessary as excellence in domain knowledge to cope with the stiff competition in the market, especially job market. When an institution is careful about both the discussed aspects, the survival of the trained students in the competitive market becomes easy. Ultimately, it brings pride to institutions and helps to maintain a commendable placement record.

An analysis of the prescribed syllabus for English under BPUT, Odisha reveals that the syllabus focuses more on grammar. The common components of classroom teaching under this syllabus are nouns, verbs, stative and dyanamic verbs, finite and non finite verbs, negation, interrogation, reported speech, question tag, conditionals, concord, phrasal verbs, active and passive voice. It has been proven by English Language Teaching (ELT) experts that teaching explicit grammar is generally boring and less effective. The struggle of undergraduate and post graduate students to be good at English is indicative of the situation that the grammar teaching does nothing good to them throughout their schooling. Thus, there is an obvious need of adopting Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) to make English less dreadful and more approachable. As per the need of the day, now we need to have a functional syllabus for teaching English where language is taught through ample communicative activities. These activities make the classes interesting and attract maximum classroom participation of the students. ASBM is one of the very few institutes which carefully ponders over this issue and keeps adopting new methods of teaching time to time. 

The flexibility of an institution to change self to adopt new methods and innovations is a commendable quality that an institute should have. It symbolizes that the institute is careful about and new trends in teaching. It is obvious that the institutions those are concerned about needs of the students this way are the most sought after destinations for MBA/ P.G.D.M, Engineering and other professional studies.

About the Author  

Sadanand Meher is Assistant Professor in English at Asian School of Business Management, Bhubaneswar. He has MA, BEd (English), MPhil, and PhD (English Language Teaching).

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