Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli (IIM-T) recently concluded its elective course on international business practices (IBP). With this course, IIM-T has added yet another avenue for providing the students a great opportunity to gain global exposure.
Learning more about international business is essential in today’s age of globalisation. International trade or business needs to be carried out to balance the resource demand and supply among countries. It also helps the exporter nation to increase its GDP, and the importer nation to avail resources at competitive prices given the multiplicity of suppliers in the market.
International business is a very big domain to explore, study and work in, and is not limited to mere negotiations with foreign clients. Rather, it makes use of various related concepts, skill sets and domain knowledge ranging from marketing and research to pitch, sales, payments, business models, strategy and more.
The course in IIM-T offers students a chance to work on actual projects offered by reputed global organisations.
The students learn things beyond cross-cultural interaction or behaviour. They get to know the practical aspects of international business, how issues may arise and work amidst the real work environment, to come up with solutions suitable to solve issue and facilitate smooth business. Therefore, a thorough knowledge of the MBA concepts taught during the first year is quite useful, along with application-oriented thinking styles like derived or lateral thinking.
The maiden batch of students subscribing to the IBP course got a chance to work with several global companies, based in Singapore, on domains spanning analytics, market research, finance and more. The course work focussed on regular research work and submissions for a period of three months, both in India as well as in Singapore.
IBP, however, should not be confused with a mere “industrial tour”, primarily because of the length of the project work, sacrosanct deadlines and submissions to a company, and extensive on the job learning opportunities, requiring the application of the concepts taught during MBA course work and problem-solving skills.
Students are thus encouraged to actively participate and take up this unique learning opportunity of IIM-T to sharpen their skills and gain practical knowledge in the world of international business.
(The author is a student of PGP 2016-18 at IIM Trichy.)