Employability Skills of Business Graduates in Job Markets of Bangladesh: Investigating Weaknesses and Suggesting Improvements

Abstract

Job seekers have to face intense competition to get the expected job in the current job market of Bangladesh. A plethora of job seekers especially business graduates are coming to the job markets having MBA degrees but fails or takes longer time to get expected jobs since employability skills are the prime requirement for every contemporary organization. The study aims to investigate the weaknesses in the employability skills of business graduates in Bangladesh and suggest some effective measures to curtail those weaknesses. A self-administered survey instrument developed, some items deleted after analysis, and some items revised to get a concrete one. This questionnaire sent to 300 students who already graduated with an MBA degree and are trying to get expected jobs. Among them, 280 usable responses collected and used as the sample in this study. The ranking method and proportion analysis used for analyzing the collected data. The findings revealed that the business graduates of Bangladesh possessed significant lacking employability skills as inadequate team-working skills, lack of communication and interpersonal skills, unable to learn and adapt to the environment, lack of negotiation skills, and shortage of organizing skills. Moreover, this study suggested some measures like providing proper training, arranging case competitions and job fairs, the mitigating gap between the schooling system and market demands, re-arranging the business curriculum, and so on for taking consideration by concerned authorities to solve the identified weaknesses.