The path that leads to a career in India is not an easy one. You are willing to take risks, but your parents don’t want you to. You want to start your own business, but your friends are busy pursuing an MBA that offers a ‘safe and cushy job’ at the end of it and are insistent that you also take it up. What happens after that is far too familiar. You give up on your dreams and eventually pursue that management course you so don’t want to.
It is no surprise then that our country keeps adding assembly-line professionals to the workforce year on year, their skillsets and job profiles often in stark contradiction with their entrepreneurial ambitions. However, all that is set to change, thanks to one institute that is determined to create fearless entrepreneurs out of students - Prahlad Kakar School of Branding and Entrepreneurship (PKSBE).
Creating leaders of tomorrow
PKSBE was launched in March 2016 with the singular objective of nurturing young entrepreneurial dreams. With the tag line ‘Beyond Fear’, this one-of-a-kind institute aims at creating potential leaders out of bright minds. Founded by ad guru Prahlad Kakar, the brain behind Genesis Films, PKSBE offers courses in Branding and Ad Film Making and Fellowship in Business and Entrepreneurship. The institute imparts knowledge that comes from three decades of industry experience. The idea is to help young minds let go of fears and inhibitions that hinder their progress and encourage them to take risks they believe in. They want their students to become entrepreneurs rather than just being employees.
Ahead of the curve
The curriculum and teaching methodology has been designed in keeping with the institute’s endeavour of creating leaders of tomorrow. Their aim is to produce professionals who are ahead of the curve when it comes to trends of the advertising and entrepreneurial world. To this end, PKSBE is the first one to introduce Market and Predictive Analytics as a subject, to help students predict or influence the future and use marketing initiatives that contribute to the bottom-line. Beyond academics, students of PKSBE are exposed to a variety of rigorous activities such as scuba diving, sky diving, mountaineering and reptile sensitisation. The objective is to bring students face to face with unknown fears, so they are able to overcome them.
Unique mentoring activities
At PKSBE, students are not only taught academics and life-skills, but are groomed and mentored to take on the real world. Some of the experiences they can look forward to are running a restaurant with Chef Jolly at JW Marriott Sahar and learning mountaineering from Jamling Tenzing. They also get to rub shoulders with personalities who are geniuses in in their individual capacities - Cricketer Gary Kirsten, Subhash Ghai, Piyush Pandey and Dr Subhash Chandra. Such interactions not only help students build their personal brands but also learn how to create and nurture relationships. That’s not all. The institute also makes an effort to reach out to parents to convince them that their children are happiest when they are realising their dreams.
Until now, students didn’t really have so much of an option to hone their entrepreneurial skills so they simply went ahead and settled for an MBA. But PKSBE is determined to change that and how!
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