IMPROVING STUDENT PLACEMENTS – using LEARNING LAUNCH Tool

Challenge

I recently joined an Engineering college that is relatively young, as a Faculty Lead in the department of  Campus placements and Career Planning for the students of Engineering. In this eight semester  program, the students have to attend the Campus Placement drives in their 7th semester to secure a job.  Companies from the core and non-core sectors visit the campus to select the students based on their  performance in the Campus selection process. The students have to get through a series of tests viz  Aptitude and Communication skills, Technical expertise, group discussions and Personal interview, to get  the placement offer. Over the past couple of years it is observed that only 40-50% of the students of  the college were getting selected in good companies in spite of the students being academically bright  (having more than 8.5 GPA out of 10) and trained well for the job selection.

The college is located around 50 miles away from the main city. It’s a 90 minute drive.  Most of the  students commute using college buses. Students spend around three and half hours in the journey (to  and fro). From the 6th semester, a three hour Campus placement training is given for all the students on  all working days. In fact the college provides all the facilities like the necessary training from experienced  faculty, very good library, good academic ambience, etc that can make a student successful. But the  students had little success. The college administration tried to improve the situation by getting more  experienced trainers, increasing the training hours, introducing more practice hours (for example, in  coding, aptitude and reasoning, etc), improve their communication skills, etc. But they didn’t see any  significant improvement in the overall placements.  We got a little over a month to find a solution.

Selection

My previous experience of working and leading in different domains in a reputed and a well established  institution viz., Branding, Placement team, Editorial board, Sports In charge, Faculty lead – student clubs,  Active Member – Board of Studies, etc helped me with a broad repertoire of experience in the activities  related to student community and functioning of the college. After deliberating with my team, we  decided to use the Learning launch tool in the matter related to student success in Campus placements.  I want to test an idea that would bring out the reasons of failure of students in Campus Placements. And  thereby we can take appropriate measures to improve the situation. So we thought learning Launch tool  is very apt for this exercise.

Application:

As a team, for our Learning Launch, we want to know the as many factors as possible that are affecting  the preparation of the student for the campus placements. I thought that our team has to interact with  all the people / stakeholders who are directly or indirectly involved in the students’ success. So my idea  is to use 360 degree feedback method to ascertain the reasons and possible solutions. I know that this  method is generally used for employee performance review. But with slight modification I want use this  method to try to solve our problem. Since the time was less and the task is big, I increased my team size

also. We made sure that all of us have a common understanding of the problem and the method used to  try to arrive at a possible solution.

Initially we identified the people with whom we have to interact and understand points of view  regarding the students’ success. We want to interact with all of them initially through a questionnaire  and then a personal interaction. We understood that we have to get in touch with Top management,  Faculty, parents, placement team, the trainers, the alumni, psychologists (if any), student peers, etc  from the college and also with people from the industry and senior academicians from other reputed  institutions (360 degrees). All the questionnaires are customized based the category of person.  We have  given one week to send back their responses.

We have got a wealth of suggestions / opinions for this seemingly difficult problem. After  comprehending them we also had a personal interaction with most of the respondents.

Insight

Learning launch tool helped us to recognize our assumptions and we made sure that launches test these  assumptions. This tool helped us to know that there are many reasons that previously not known or  anticipated that affects the students’ success in campus placements. I want to mention a few here. For  example, from the students’ response we understood that the training is effective only if it conducted in  the early morning (not in the late afternoon, which is the case in general). From the parents we got to  know that their wards have lot of distractions at home and also they are losing enough time during the  travel. (Now we made the training in-house – all students stay in the campus during the training period).  From the people from the industry, we came to know that the students lack some important skills that  industry expects like critical thinking and problem solving skills, working in teams, proper  communication skills, etc. Like this, the Learning Launch tool not only helped us to test our assumptions  in an effective manner but also have thrown some new insights into how we have to train our students  into their future.

Approach:

This tool helped us to look at a specific problem from different perspectives. I believe that if the problem  (similar to the problem we had) involves many different players or has a freedom to withstand few  failures, Launch tool is a good option. In my opinion, the choice of the tool depends on the type of  problem we have at hand. One size fits all approach is not appropriate to arrival at effective solutions.

The design thinking-led collaborations will definitely helps us to improve the quality and novelty of the  approaches to solve problems of the future. It would be the best approach to find solutions to human- centered problems. Design thinking mindset would definitely help both organizations and individuals to  find creative and optimal solutions.

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