Industrial visits are an essential part of the academic curriculum in most of the Graduate and Post-graduate courses. Being a part of interactive learning, such educational visits give students a major exposure to real working environments along with a practical perspective of a theoretical concept relevant to their domain. In addition to that, industrial visits bridge the widening gap between theoretical learning and practical exposure by giving students the first-hand exposure to identify the inputs and outputs for different business operations and processes performed at the workplace.
Intending to go beyond classroom learning, the industrial tours contribute a lot in holistic student development by letting students learn about the current trends in the market, the future scenario of the industry and the new technologies that are being applied in the industry.
Given below are a few significant benefits of industrial tours:
- Opportunity to interact with Industry Experts: Industrial visits provide students with a chance to meet industry leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and corporates who share their wisdom, learning, and experiences. These interactions are useful to students in their career and help them in developing leadership qualities, management skills, and learn about the industry working. Industry interaction is also helpful in updating the curriculum when there are significant changes in prevalent technologies; also, the faculty members get to know about the industry’s latest trends.
- Learning experience: Educational tours to industries provide an opportunity for students to see and experience real workstations, plants, machines, systems, assembly lines, and interact with highly trained and experienced personnel. This practical learning experience is necessary for students who have to date studied theory only and are unaware of a real production plant’s daily workings. The students learn about company policies in terms of production, quality, and service management and acquaint themselves with the working of instruments during the course curriculum.
- Enhanced employability and PPO’s: Industrial visits play a crucial role in increasing networking opportunities while building a good relationship with companies. For students, such trips open many doors for corporate training and internships, which in turn increase the students’ employability. Oftentimes, many students are offered PPO’s as a result of fruitful interaction between the company’s HR and students.
- Management Lessons: During the industrial visits, the students get an opportunity to experience how professionals live, learn about various management concepts like Just In Time or Lean manufacturing and how they are put into action. It is not easy to manage hundreds of skilled and unskilled workers at the same time and meet the stringent quality norms and production targets of the company. How managers, production engineers, employees work in tandem to achieve a common target is a management lesson in itself. And therefore, such exposure during the industrial visit is quite beneficial for MBA students.
- Interpersonal skills enhancement: Industrial trips help students to enhance their interpersonal, communication skills, and teamwork abilities. These visits have, time and again, proved to be an excellent platform for networking as the students interact and connect with the corporates via official social media platforms like Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter. These educational/ industrial trips also help the students identify their learning towards a branch and decide their future work areas like marketing, finance, operations, IT, HR, etc.
- Day off from the usual melancholy: Finally, these industrial visits provide the students much-needed break from the usual melancholic theory classes, and students get a chance to engage in fun learning. The students get an opportunity to learn something outside the four walls of their college.
Endless chats, selfie sessions, bus games, friendly conversations with faculty members all make students see a new caring side of their teachers, which is a fun and learning experience at the same time.
Industrial visits are usually the first point of interaction between a student and a live working industry. The students learn about the latest technology trend and make up their minds about their future job or area of interest. However, students and teachers both should take this seriously and utilize this industrial visit for learning and enhancing their skills. This trip should not be wasted in idle fun and jokes and should be used for team bonding and learning along with a bit of fun.
Sharda University Aims for Holistic Student Learning
North India’s truly global educational institution – Sharda University understands the significant importance of field trips and excursions for a student’s overall development. To supplement the classroom learning with practical exposure, Sharda University organises various industrial visits so that students can gain practical insights into industry operations and be ready for the outside world
Some of the visits that students have undertaken are:
- Industrial Mahakumbh in collaboration with Indian Industries Association to promote ideas exchange and nurture entrepreneurial skills
- Batching Plant, Greater Noida, for the students of M.Tech Construction Management
- Voltrans Energy for B.Tech. EEE and M.Tech. EEE
- Cisco Networking at Network Bulls, Gurugram to help students acquire live theoretical and practical training on networking and working of Cisco Routers, Switches and Firewalls.
- Yakult Danone India (P) Ltd., Sonipat, Haryana to help students understand the importance of the food Technologist profession, HACCP and FSMS implementation
- MCN Solutions, Noida where students got a great exposure of Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Hololens, Goggle Card Boards, Echo Dot, Google Home and more
- IBM data center, Bangalore to help Btech students to acquire a better understanding of recent industry trends in the regular curriculum
Sharda University believes that the bright students are the key drivers of the nation’s growth engine and nurturing their talent with the best theoretical knowledge well as practical orientation is the core responsibility of the University. Spread across a sprawling campus spread across 63 acres land, the University leaves no stone unturned for the holistic development of students by giving them quick access to state-of-art facilities so that each student gain high self-esteem, more knowledge and grow stronger in his/her career.
