Schools and colleges need to overhaul their syllabus to make students employable, industry representatives said during a discussion at St Xavier’s University.

The students must also be armed with behavioural skills so that they can develop the right attitude to work, the discussion on Emerging Talent Trends concluded.

“About 69 per cent of commerce graduates remain unemployed because the syllabus they are taught in colleges is not up to date. Unemployability stems from this gap,” Krishan Mishra, head of north and east India, ACCA, the global body for professional accountants, told Metro.

Mishra was one of the panellists at the discussion held on the New Town campus as part of the Talent Management Roundtable 2.0 the changing landscape of leadership.

The commerce syllabus in most colleges doesn’t teach anything about International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), currently the required accounting framework in over 120 countries, he said.

Engineering institutes, on the other hand, need to introduce subjects such as Internet of things, machine learning, artificial intelligence, Mishra added.

Munmun Nath, the principal of Calcutta International School, said teachers, too, need to unlearn and change their way of teaching.

The institutes should guide students and equip them with behavioural skills and emotional quotient, stressed Nandini Chakrabarty, the executive director of Ernst & Young GDS. “This helps you to react to a certain situation, work in a team,” she said.

Taking part in a discussion on “young leadership”, St Xavier’s University vice-chancellor Felix Raj said the panel discussions were aimed at exposing the MBA students to the leaders of the industry, so that they would be able to understand the ground reality.

“These students are looking for placements and internship. So they should know the ground realities first hand from the representatives of the industry,” he said.

Supriyo Sinha, CEO-Education, Pratibha at ABP Pvt. Ltd, said the hallmark of a futuristic advanced organisation in the context of talent management was one that invested time and bandwidth to figure out who was the person with the right skill set for a job.