Campus to Careers: The Employability Question

Institutions have long relied on placements as proof that they are doing something right.

A strong placement report signals market relevance. And to be fair, it does capture something real. If a student walks out of a campus with a degree and a job offer, the market has, at the very least, found that graduate credible.

But that is only the beginning of the story. In this episode of Jetri Dialogs, the conversation asked a sharper question:

When a student leaves with a degree and a first job, have we truly done what we promised?

Because placement numbers tell us something about the start of a career, not the shape of one.

To discuss this, Jetri brought together three professionals who sit at the critical interface between campuses and industry:

• Priyanka Chandhok, who leads Career Advancement at Ashoka University
• Somedutta Chatterjee, who leads Career Advancement Services at ISB
• Shrabani Ghosh, who leads Corporate Partnerships and Careers at Plaksha University
  

The conversation quickly made one thing clear:

Employability cannot be reduced to first-job success.

The real question is whether institutions are preparing students to remain valuable long after the first offer letter is signed.

Placement reports matter. But they are only a partial truth.

The discussion opened with an important acknowledgment from all three panelists: placement outcomes are not irrelevant.

They matter because they:

• signal institutional credibility
• benchmark performance
• reflect whether the market sees graduates as employable

Priyanka put it plainly - 

“We focus a lot on placement statistics, numbers: salaries, packages, and day one  offers, etc because it's a measurable snapshot of outcomes and signals institutional credibility.”

But the deeper success lies elsewhere: in building lifelong learners, ethical leaders, and conscious citizens who contribute meaningfully to their fields and communities.

And that distinction matters.

What career offices actually do is far more than placements

Career offices do not begin their work when companies arrive. They begin much earlier, often as soon as students enter campus.

Priyanka Chandhok: career preparation starts from the first year

At Ashoka, the careers office starts early by helping students:

• build industry awareness
• identify possible career paths
• understand what drives them
• map aspirations to real opportunities
• prepare for roles beyond the obvious, prestige-heavy pathways

She described a career preparatory program that begins right when students enter the university:

“We do work very closely with students in really counseling them, and in helping them understand what they can do beyond what's obvious.”

Somedutta Chatterjee: in a one-year MBA, speed makes structure even more important

At ISB, where the flagship PGP is an 11-month program, the luxury of long-form exploration is limited. So the institution has had to become much more deliberate about experiential learning and career clarity.

Somedutta mentioned:

“We have a sub-team, which is Career Advisory and Professional Development, that just works with students to understand role clarity, career clarity, pivot decisions that the students are trying to make.“

ISB also uses tech-enabled tools to gather raw student data early, synthesize it, compare it against role requirements and historical patterns, and feed insights back into the system.

Shrabani Ghosh: building from first principles means building both sides

At Plaksha, Shrabani had the challenge of building a careers office from scratch. She described:

“ We met with at least, you know, 600 companies in the initial years. Because we had to have a very robust pipeline to talk to companies.“

It helped students think through whether they wanted traditional tech roles, entrepreneurship, or other paths aligned to Plaksha’s larger vision. She also emphasized that career teams cannot work in isolation. Much of the work required close collaboration with faculty so industry-readiness signals could actually shape curriculum choices.

The strongest shared theme: early investment in student aspirations

Across all three institutions, one theme came through repeatedly:

Students need help understanding what they want and what it will take to get there much earlier than most institutions assume.

This early investment looks different in different contexts:

• At Ashoka, it means a long runway of four years to build awareness and experimentation
• At ISB, it means compressed but intensive role clarity and pivot support
• At Plaksha, it means helping students connect an interdisciplinary education to emerging employer needs and entrepreneurial ambitions

What placement numbers hide

If placement reports do not tell the full story, what exactly do they leave out?

Shrabani Ghosh: numbers do not capture the real capability gaps

Shrabani argued,

“Employers are looking beyond the stated job description.” 

Technical fundamentals may remain non-negotiable. But employers are now asking additional questions:

• Can this student work at the intersection of technology and business?
• Can they explain technical ideas to non-technical stakeholders?
• Can they solve business problems, not just coding problems?
• Can they navigate ambiguity as roles evolve faster than job descriptions?

This is the nuance a placement report misses.

Somedutta Chatterjee: the same CTC can hide radically different career trajectories

Somedutta made a similar point with a powerful example:

“Two students might have secured the same CTC, might have gotten jobs in the same sector. One could be a tech job in a well-established large brand, and one could be a tech job in a startup that has just gotten a large funding, and it's moving from the zero to one growth journey, right? The requirements for the role, the maturity, the understanding, the wide breadth of work that the individual has to do is very different in both the roles, right? But both the students will feature in the same statistic in the report.”

So placement reports flatten what are, in reality, very different professional journeys.

Priyanka Chandhok: employers are moving from narrow screening to holistic evaluation

Priyanka added that the nature of evaluation itself is changing:

“Employers are increasingly now gravitating towards students who bring in diverse skill sets, interdisciplinary thinking, etc.“

She pointed to examples such as gamified cognitive assessments and case competitions that begin much earlier in the funnel and lead to internships and eventual hiring.

The market is no longer hiring for potential alone. 

One of the sharpest insights from the session came from Somedutta:
“ Corporates don't look for just potential anymore. They look for readiness.”

Roles are changing, companies are being disrupted, technology is reshaping expectations, and geopolitical shifts are affecting industries in real time.

In that environment, employers are asking:

• Can this graduate hit the ground running?
• Can they handle ambiguity?
• Can they hold stakeholder conversations?
• Can they communicate with maturity?
• Can they carry the broader business context?

This shift from potential to readiness has major consequences for how universities design learning. A short interview cannot fully test these qualities. Which means institutions have to create deeper, earlier, and more strategic relationships with recruiters.

The recruiter relationship cannot begin at placement season

Somdata made an important point:

“As a school, we feel larger, longer engagements with corporates are very critical. We can't have placement discussions and outreach happening in the nth hour to bring them on campus for hiring.”

If institutions only reach out to companies when they want them to hire, they have already started too late. At ISB, the effort lets recruiters:

• experience the school
• observe the students
• understand the curriculum
• engage with faculty
• build comfort with the institution over time

She described bringing senior leaders from firms to campus to teach masterclasses or engage in smaller classroom settings. The goal is to build trust that makes employers more willing to hire, especially from newer or less familiar programs.

Shrabani described a similar approach at Plaksha. Since Plaksha did not have legacy brand comfort or a long placement history, the team often had to work with employers by understanding the actual problem they were trying to solve, and then matching students to those needs rather than force-fitting them into conventional role templates. That allowed them to make a more credible case for their students.

Liberal arts, interdisciplinary education, and the long game of employability

Breadth, interdisciplinarity, and critical thinking are also career preparation for a long and changing future. But that thesis does not always map neatly into employer expectations.

When Ashoka started, there was significant resistance to hiring from a liberal arts and sciences institution. Many organizations were used to recruiting only from engineering and management campuses.

The early strategy involved personal networks and founder relationships to get initial employers on board. But over time, the real proof came from employer feedback and alumni performance.

According to Priyanka:

“We get some great feedback on the way they articulate or approach their problems is absolutely unique and very refreshing. Their ability to frame the right questions, find the right solutions, empathize, build judgment, think across various disciplines, or approach a problem from different lenses.”

That is what has started turning the flywheel.

What corporate life asks of people 

Pramath turned to Shrabani’s two decades in corporate banking and asked what that experience revealed to her that academia often misses.

She explained:

“Any corporate environment teaches you what nobody puts in a JD, right? That's what you learn on the job, and yes, it is very different from a sanitized academic environment. In the professional world, you face situations that a campus simply cannot prepare you for”

Professional life requires people to deal with:

• collaboration without authority
• stakeholder relationships
• unhappy clients
• conflicting incentives across teams
• hard deadlines that do not move
• cross-functional navigation
• real stakes under pressure

Campus pressure, even when intense, is usually still structured. Extensions are possible. Stakes are often educational. Professional pressure is different.

That is why Plaksha has consciously leaned into:

• experiential learning
• project work
• capstones
• real industry problem statements
• mentors from industry
• repeated exposure to ambiguity and collaboration

The aim is not to simulate corporate life perfectly. It is to prepare students for its texture.

The careers office can and should influence curriculum

Career teams should not only patch skill gaps at the end. They should influence curriculum upstream.

Shrabani described working closely with faculty to:

• communicate what industry was looking for
• pull certain courses earlier into the curriculum
• ensure interview-relevant capabilities were built in time
• align experiential components with market needs
  

Somedutta described something similar at ISB, where student and market insights flow back into the broader academic system, even if the curriculum cannot change completely year on year.

This shift suggests that employability is not the job of a placement team alone. It is an institutional design question.

Undergraduate vs postgraduate employability needs are different

Pramath asked whether Ashoka’s responsibility varies across undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Priyanka’s answer was yes — but with an interesting nuance.

“Undergraduate students are, you know, mostly entering the workforce for the first time, and they have the advantage of time to explore, experiment, and build skills. It's a longer development process for them, and they have multiple touchpoints, like internship, mentoring, and skill building.“

Ashoka’s career preparatory program reflects that. In the first years, the focus is on basics. Later years move into more specialized preparation depending on the path. 

On the other hand, she mentioned:

“Postgraduate students are a mature cohort and they have been through parts of this journey, not all of it, I would say, during their UG experiences”

They are generally:

• looking to pivot,
• trying to deepen impact, or
• deliberately changing direction

So their preparation is more compressed and intensified.

But what was notable was her insistence that the two cohorts are not kept entirely separate. Clubs and placement committees often include both, creating peer learning between curiosity-driven undergraduates and professionally exposed postgraduates. That cross-learning itself becomes part of career readiness.

Employability also includes higher education, entrepreneurship, and non-placement outcomes

One of the most useful interventions in the session came when Priyanka pointed out that career success cannot be reduced to placements alone.

At Ashoka, a significant portion of students pursue:

• higher education
• global scholarships
• research pathways
• entrepreneurial routes
  

These outcomes may not improve salary averages in the short term. In fact, if an institution wanted to optimize only for compensation numbers, it could push more students into jobs and away from these alternative paths.

But Ashoka has chosen to account for these outcomes explicitly in its reporting.

This was echoed by Shrabani, who noted that Plaksha, too, has had to ensure that entrepreneurial ambitions and higher education choices are celebrated rather than treated as secondary.

What MBA recruiters evaluate differently

What are recruiters evaluating in an MBA candidate that they may not necessarily evaluate in an undergraduate?

Somedutta highlighted three themes:

1. Clarity of thought

Recruiters want MBA candidates to know:

• where they want to head
• how they are using their pre-program experience
• why the degree matters to their next step

2. Readiness for mid- to senior-level conversations

Because of the ISB brand and the profile of students, many recruiters hire not for entry-level execution but for more mature business responsibility.

That means candidates need:

• poise
• stakeholder handling
• communication discipline
• executive presence
• the ability to summarize complex ideas sharply

3. Authenticity of pivot

Somedutta noted that “pivot” has become a fashionable word.

Many candidates claim they want to shift sectors or functions. But recruiters probe whether the shift is genuinely researched and motivated, or simply a response to compensation, prestige, or surface-level attraction.

This is where self-reflection becomes critical — and where short-format programs often feel the crunch. In her words, there is still a long way to go in helping students figure out who they want to become, not just where they want to land.

Parents remain a real force in employability decisions

An audience question brought in another important stakeholder: parents.

Shrabani Ghosh: parents often define success differently from students

She noted that many parents continue to carry older definitions of:

• top brands
• top roles
• high-status career paths
• compensation as the main signal of value

But students may want something different.

A brand that felt “marquee” to one generation may not be the dream employer for the next. That requires conversations, sometimes difficult ones, about what success means.

Priyanka Chandhok: ROI is a painful but necessary conversation

Priyanka said Ashoka is often asked the ROI question.

Her response is: If you are measuring return over the first year alone, this may not be the right place. But if you are measuring it over a 10-year horizon, then the conversation changes.

She also noted:

“What's changing now is the nature of parental concern. So, while earlier it was about salary and job security. Now, it's about helping them understand the plethora of opportunities that are available for their children.”

Ashoka has been working more closely with parent networks, not only to educate them but also to involve them as stakeholders who can open opportunities for students.

What happens to students who don’t make it immediately?

Another audience question asked about remedial support for students who do not secure jobs on the initial cycle.

Somedutta’s answer was direct:

“The Career Advancement Services team at ISB is here to support the students till they find the job.”

That means support continues beyond the high-visibility “day zero/day one” chaos through rolling placements, advanced mock interviews, one-to-one mapping, network-based outreach, and sustained handholding.

This is important for two reasons:

1. It reflects institutional responsibility beyond optics.
2. It acknowledges that placement systems need flexibility, not just speed.

The future-looking skills employers are asking for

In the final quick-fire round, Pramath asked each panelist for one future-facing skill employers are emphasizing.

• Shrabani: agility and adaptability
• Somedutta: resilience, along with technological fluency and AI orientation
• Priyanka: first-principles thinking, synthesis across disciplines, and the ability to solve unfamiliar problems

So what should institutions really be designing for?

Across the conversation, a clear framework emerged. If institutions want to think about employability more maturely, they need to move beyond placement statistics.

Because employability is not just about helping students get hired. It is about helping them remain valuable as the world changes around them.

That requires something more ambitious than placement support. It requires institutions to design for:

• judgment
• adaptability
• resilience
• communication
• interdisciplinary thinking
• and real-world readiness

Because the first job may open the door. But the real work of education is whether students can keep walking through the rooms that come after.