An Indian Student’s Self-designed path to gain skills to become an inter-disciplinary 21st century global manager

What is ‘Envisioning 21st century global manager’ project?

My name is Ankit Khandelwal and I am from Kota, Rajasthan, India. A major in Chemical Engineering from Technical University of Denmark, in the early 2012, I have realized my potential towards becoming an interdisciplinary global business manager. From that time on-wards, I have worked next 2 years on ‘Envisioning 21st century global manager’ project, a customized project to equip me with the skill-sets needed to become a 21st century global manager. Faced with issues of money and resources, this project has been done with minimum resources and innovatively using the free available educational material online. Using OCW (OpenCourseWare), MOOC (Massive Open Online courses) platform, I have taken courses from different universities (general management as well as interdisciplinary sectors like trade negotiations, urban planning, public policy, climate change, emergency management etc), tried to self-learn 3 foreign languages and extensively studied newspaper from 8-10 different places of the world for regular business happenings around the globe. I have tried to expand my outreach by reaching every corner of the world through many projects, study of the regions or through expansion of networks. Equally important was my study of different cultures to prepare myself for negotiating/working in the multicultural environment (political/social and ground realities).

How I did this? What were some of the challenges as I faced? And what was the reason for setting up my own educational program rather than going for conventional education? Go through my short-story explaining my work in summarized manner.

Realization in early 2012

I always wanted to be a manager in my long term career and liked to engage in solving complex situations, with this aim, I worked hard alongside my engineering education to gain many relevant soft-skills. Whether it was managing family business, organizing events at university, preparing cases for biggest engineering competition in Europe, taking participation in strategy planning competition at National level, leading a multicultural team, advising an start up in their expansion plans or writing grant applications to get funding form EU, I wore many different hats. Whether small or big, taking different roles prepare me to work under pressure, making quick decisions, working effectively as a team and deal with uncertainty. Combining all these, in early 2012, I realized my potential and interest to take all these things up to become a 21st century global manager. A kind of person who is quick learner, have an interdisciplinary approach of problem solving, has ability to work outside his area of expertise if situation demands, can work anywhere in the world, make decision with least information and can communicate with any kind of person. How can it be possible?

Idea gathering phase (May 2012- April 2012)

After this vision, I have spent 2 months in researching, what kind of skills such a person might need? I spent time in reading various employment survey reports, issues faced by large corporation, studies of future trends and other related information to get an approximated set of skills. It came out that apart from general management studies and international economics, following 3 areas need to be take into consideration.

1.Interdisciplinary studies: With my participation in European Parliament Open Days, I wanted to include public policy as one of the interdisciplinary aspects in my learning. Others included design thinking, basics of understanding international trade law.

2. Future trends: Environmental Law & Policy, Urban planning were few of the trends, I have identified which can be useful for a person to understand the organization’s changing needs. ‘Big data’ is another trend, which I have added in the later part of the project from a discussion in LinkedIn.

3. Globalization, Culture and Languages: When I have used the world ‘global manager’, it was necessary for me to actually understand first the meaning behind globalization and how I adopt this in my learning. My positive experiences of living in Denmark was helpful in it. In my own research, I have found business deals have failed and e-mail communication confused sides from different nations, because they did not understand each other’s culture. Although, there is no single definition on what is termed as culture but in my view combine study of (history, geography, festivals, economic conditions, likes & dislikes, local customs, social structure etc) can make one slightly more culturally sensitive even without living in that place. I have also decided to learn few important foreign languages to be able to communicate better with other people.

Setting up my own study program

Choosing skills over degree: By now, you might have seen that my ambition was too big to be fit in any traditional program. Moreover, my obsession was gaining the skills not with degree. However, risky it was in 2012, today it seems to be justified when looking at the outcomes.

Financial means: Even, if it could be possible to fulfill my ambition of becoming this interdisciplinary person than I might had to wait for a long time to start such education. But there is no guarantee, I can afford it in future also. With already aware of the mismatch between university education and industry requirements, the results of which are many people sitting with high debt occur through their student loan. I had not interest in joining them.

Project implementation phase ( May 2012- till recently)

I put my available options, dream, ambition and risk involved in front of me and after deep thinking, decided to pursue it myself rather than waiting for it in future. That means, I had to find out my own resources, self-taught myself and even find ways to practice them. Very uncertain initially and started with OpenCourseWare’s to check the validity of my vision itself. Arrival of MOOC(Massive Open Online Courses) have removed any remaining doubts. Later, I have worked hard for 2 continuous years to become the kind of person, I have thought of once. Apart from MOOC, I have also used many easily available resources to either study culture, self-learning languages, understanding market trends or expanding my network.

Practicing knowledge to turn them into skills

While working on this project, I spent majority of my time in my home town with an effort to reduce my expenses and getting things done with minimum resources.As, I did not have luxury to do internships, buying cases to read, my best bet was to turn to surrounding environment and making the best use of available online/offline situations.

1. Course project/essays/other competitions: Online course projects included strategic analysis on an African Bank, comparative economic analysis between 2 Latin American countries, globalization project on Kazakstan, solving a dispute in context of EU Legislations, checking environment law violation disputes at a farm in USA and also modifying traffic plan of my own city. I have also written essays covering cultural aspects of Iran, China, Latin America as well as Middle-East. Using the knowledge from courses, I have participated in several competitions, important of them were ‘Improving competitiveness of Eastern Europe’ and ‘Improving cultural cooperation between India-Russia’.

2. Side studies/helping others/volunteering projects: Some of the side studies, I have undertaken using the course knowledge were,‘How to maintain discipline in lines in crowded temples of India’, ‘Marketing in megacities in 2020’ etc. I have observed an under construction bridge in my vicinity continuously for 2 months and made notes to test different project management tools. Using knowledge of finance, I helped a street vendor to solve his debt worries and another street vendor to increase his revenues. I have also helped an NGO in Sierra Leone in improving their agricultural activities and helped a Mexican firm to improve their packaging efficiency.

3. Social Media/Other readings: Living in my hometown offered me very little possibility to have face to face interactions on topics of my interest. So, I turned to virtual world and became more active on social media. Especially at different groups of LinkedIn/Facebook for exchanging information, putting my thoughts on issues of public policy, culture, project management, leadership, international trade etc. Also used social media to self-learn languages. As I could not buy the case studies; I have read easily available resources like company annual reports, published reports of international institutions (world bank, IMF, EU etc) to gain necessary depth in different economic sectors.

Outcomes & Relevance to other

Although, I have put both my personal life and professional career at risk, today I am really glad that I took this risk of designing my own path. This project has exceeded my own expectations and made an initial step towards my long term goal of becoming a global manager. It has helped me in becoming what I wanted to, in a way I wanted without putting any additional financial burden on me. My project has been already appreciated at other places of the world (UNESCO, International Council of Open and Distance Education to name a few) and can also be used for other youngsters to try taking affordable education using those easily available resources. 21st century education is taking a new shape and I have just shown one way of educating oneself.