It was launched in September last year with academic support from IIM-A, IIM-C and IIM-I. After getting a good response, NIIT Imperia is now ready to expand nationwide and is planning to double its centers.
MBAUniverse.com decided to speak with Dr Smarajit Dey, President, Strategic Initiatives at NIIT Ltd who has been leading this initiative. He also oversees the operations of the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance (IFBI). Earlier, Dr. Dey has led NIIT’s Individual Learning Business, set-up NIIT Online Learning Ltd., headed Corporate Development & Quality, and managed NIIT’s Software and Learning initiatives in East India & Bangladesh.
Dr Dey holds a Doctorate in Information Systems from BITS Pilani. He was on the faculty of BITS Pilani before joining NIIT. Dr Dey also serves on the Executive Board of the Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS).
In this extensive interview with MBAUniverse.com, Dr Dey shares the rationale for NIIT’s thrust in management education sector, e-Learning process, the lessons from the journey of NIIT Imperia so far, and the road ahead.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: NIIT Imperia has completed a year of operations. What has been the response?
We have done very well. The model has been accepted by executives and our enrolment numbers are rising. We are entering into new locations. The feedback from academic partners has been good too.
Q: Lets go back to the evolution of NIIT Imperia. What was the background that led to this business model?
The idea of providing management education using technology platform was on our mind at NIIT for quite some time. We got down to executing it in mid 2005; we rolled out our service in September 2006. So it took about a year of focused work.
Simply put, there are two sides to development of NIIT Imperia – the demand side and the supply side.
The massive demand for management education is clear from over 1800 B-schools India has. That is a very large number. Every year, lakhs of students take CAT and this number is rising. But India’s management education sector is very academic and MBA-for-fresher oriented. Students getting into B-schools are typically with low work experience. But, as Indian economy booms, demand exists at all ends of the management training spectrum.
On the supply side, NIIT has excelled in providing IT education for decades. We understand education process and delivery well. As we were looking for new growth drivers at NIIT, management education was a natural fit. We believed that our expertise in distributed retail education coupled with quality management content from partners will meet the needs.
Q: NIIT Imperia focuses on executives exclusively. Why this focus and how does it impact the model?
Yes, we focused on building our model exclusively on executives. There is a vacuum in the market. While many feel the need, there are very few executives who are able to drop their jobs and family pressures and pursue full time management education at premier management institutes. So, they need an offering tailor-made to their needs. Further their education expectations are more specific to what industry they work in, and at what stage of their careers they are. NIIT Imperia offers best in class management content in partnership with IIMs and other institutes to need these needs.
Q: Was convincing the IIMs a big challenge?
Yes, it was. In fact IIM-A had never ever gone into distance education mode earlier! Since NIIT has been associated with quality education for a long time, and we are an organization that believes in certain values, IIMs were less skeptical to start with. Then, while they understood the need and the utility of this model quickly, to transfer the pedagogy of a classroom into the tech-enabled platform was a big challenge. It took us about six months to ready the platform which was rich and robust enough to take on the challenge. Once that passed the muster, it was relatively simpler.
Q: How is executive management education different from a traditional MBA which attracts fresh talent?
The two are different in their approach, content and expected results. As an executive moves up the organizational hierarchy, two things happen: one, he acquires some experience and know-how of the work place; and two, he develops specific skill and knowledge gaps or needs to do his job better. Executive Education fills this gap. It is customized to work on a specific need while traditional MBA is more generic.
Q: What is the size of executive education market in India?
We estimate the size to be in the region of one million individuals. Independent studies point to that number. We also did a calculation using CAT takers as benchmark. We said all CAT takers over the last fifteen-year can be the potential market. This figure works out to about one million too.
Q: Considering that this was a new model, what are some learnings from 12 months of operations?
Let me split my response into two parts: current areas of strengths and areas of improvements. Our participants have liked the experience of management education delivered thru a synchronous real-time NIIT Imperia platform. As per our survey, 74 per cent participants felt that this was better than classroom experience. IIM involvement and on-campus workshops have been appreciated. We have got our content right as well.
But there have been some areas of dissonance as well. The biggest area is Placements. We learnt about the student psyche mid-way into the progamme that knowledge and certification is not enough. Career upgrade is an important deliverable they look for.
Q: So how are you adapting to this need?
We are approaching this need with three pronged approach. We are planning to offer career-upgrade enablement, support and facilitation. Enablement is all about evangelizing the benefits of our courses to organizations of participants and other corporates. This, we hope, helps our executive students get better leverage within their current organizations. Then, we support career-upgrades by providing counseling sessions on resume writing, industry opportunity and presentation techniques to a prospective employer. Finally, as part of our career facilitation programme, we have tie-ups with job-portals that can help executives who are actively looking for change.
Q: Moving on, recently IIMs have entered the executive education domain with PGPX or similar programmes. Does NIIT Imperia compete with them….
The two are different offerings. The programmes offered by IIMs are fulltime and have limited enrolments. Today, they enroll about 40 odd participants per institute. So even if all top fifty management institutes start offering 40 seats, they will add up to just 2000 seats. The demand is much more! Certainly the on campus experience provided by IIMs is better than what we offer, but it comes at a much higher cost. It is priced at about Rs 10 lakh and demands full time presence. Not all executive can afford that.
NIIT Imperia hopes to hit the sweet-spot of mass proliferation and accessibility without diluting the core experience too much.
Q: Distance learning in management domain has other players like Universitas 21 (U21), Reliance World and HughesNet. How do you see them…
Let me answer this by emphasizing what we offer. We offer Synchronous learning platform which is much superior to Online learning modules. Synchronous learning is closest to the classroom experience. Classroom education, at its core, is faculty-lead and faculty-controlled. This uniqueness is built into NIIT Imperia technology. Here, faculty controls the flow of class, and can even transfer the control to a student for an exercise. Online learning platforms don’t allow this flow.
With respect to some other telecom players who have ventured into management education as a value-added service, all I can say is that we are an education company. This is our core business and we have expertise in developing and distribution education.
Q: Recently you have rolled out management development programmes. What is the thinking there?
Management Development Programmes (MDPs) are designed to fill specific skill-gaps that exist. Long or mid-term executive programmes are more holistic in their coverage. For example, a long-term program may be about strategic HR management, while MDP can be on performance-appraisal. So they are fundamentally different. IIM A, IIM C, IIM I and IMT Ghaziabad will offer these courses. We are also planning to offer 30 per cent of our MDPs by subject experts. We believe industry experts are well equipped to train on specific skills.
Q: Are you looking at increasing the number of institutions…
We are in discussion with some schools. Yes, the numbers are likely to increase.
We believe that each of the top 20 or 30 institutes has some uniqueness to offer. So we are certainly looking to expand our partners. We look for institutes that believe in expanding their reach and feel that technology enabled solutions like ours are a good way to reach out.
Q: Were does NIIT Imperia go from here?
Now that the foundation is set, we want to scale up nationally. Apart from big-metros, the need for quality management education exists in Tier-II and Tier-III centers all across India. In fact, the need is even more critical in those areas.
Currently, NIIT Imperia offers the program at 10 centers in eight cities. We have recently added two more centers in Bhubaneshwar and Nagpur. We plans to expand to 20 centers in 15 or 16 cities by March 2008.
Further, by 2010, we have plans to be present in 75 cities with about 100 centers. When that happens, we should have about 40,000 to 50,000 students at that time.
