Tough Economic Lesson For Country’s Engineering Academicians
Engineering is the practice of making things better, more efficient and getting more out of the resources.
With the opening up of the economy nearly 2 decades back and the global workforce movement, India saw plethora of opportunities open up. The easiest thing to do was to open up a new engineering college, and hence we have more engineering colleges than McDonald’s, Dominos, PizzaHut and a few more fast food chains put together.
Over the last 2-3 years, as the industry has tightened and Indian IT industry is seeing perhaps its first slump in 2 decades, most smart colleges have doubled up (and more) their marketing spending and have been able to ensure sanity.
Till we saw 2017. The engineering colleges and the intake in them is struggling. By some estimates, the form sales have taken a hit by as much as 25% to 30%. And this in an industry where institutes have increased seats almost every year. The more expensive ones, the ones which have lower quality infrastructure and can’t justify their stance are the worst hit, but everyone is going through the pain.
Engineering is about making things better, more efficient and getting more out of the resources. And now it’s about managing the demand and supply. Reduced demand means the production capacity need to reduce, infrastructure need to be reduced, spending need to be stopped. Something that our engineering academicians haven’t done yet. Unless you do the following:
Take the hoopla out of it and engineering college admissions are nothing more than a well run ecommerce campaign. The focus is on form sales, which guarantees the first level of association with the institute and then it’s about creating right customer experience to walk the student from form sale to admission. Getting the right marketing campaign and leveraging digital can be guaranteed success mechanism (assuming you have some good story and set-up to back it up). The good thing is, colleges produce enough content for ongoing marketing (events, projects, faculty updates, placements, admissions and numerous others). The important thing is to ensure you have chosen the right partner. Call us if you are struggling to find one.
