Industry-Led Webinars Begin at Amity University
Noida: Amity University Uttar Pradesh (AUUP) created yet another benchmark by organizing a series of webinars with industry professionals to enlighten the career path of its students with the knowledge and guidance from corporate leads. These webinars focused on the road ahead for industry and how students should reshape their career path post end of the COVID-19 induced lock down.
AUUP initiated this series with a webinar on ‘COVID-2019 – What lies in store for the industry and academia’ with Mr. Sugato Bose, Head, SNS Global Concepts and Dr. Renu Rajani, a management and IT professional. Dr Gurinder Singh, Group Vice-Chancellor, Amity University initiated the webinar.
Mr. Sugato Bose spoke about how COVID-19 is depicting a manner of nature claiming itself and how this pandemic is affecting the economy of countries and financial condition of various conglomerates. He emphasized on the point that leaders and people involved in numerous businesses must rethink their strategy to do business and reinvent the key aspects.
Mr. Bose also discussed about how the industries will suffer due to the vanishing of impulsive buying and categorization of essential and non-essential products, people will focus only on the purchase of the essentials. He also laid emphasis on the fact that due to the pandemic, there will be unemployment and major cutbacks in salary of those who still have jobs, which will lead people in crisis to spend less on luxury items and thereby affecting businesses.
He suggested that students will have to rethink their options because there will be a scarcity of jobs. He further drew attention to the point that e-commerce might be on the rise during times like these and start-ups with innovative ideas solving after-effects of pandemic may be the only road-map to grow for students.
Dr. Renu Rajani shared that at the time of this doom, businesses have been able to test their resilience and that the education sector is the one which is least impacted. She said the priorities of the business during this pandemic should be securing livelihoods so that economic should be contained. She advised the students to be flexible, determined and always be ready to acquire new skills. The webinar concluded with the thought that businesses will have to take new measures to come back to their normal pace.
In another webinar session with the industry, Mr. Anupam Bansal, Executive Director, Liberty Footwear talked about the challenge to think forward from this pandemic. Sharing his views with the students and faculty members, Mr. Bansal shared that all companies will face tremendous transition and the fittest will survive.
He further elaborated that cash flow management will be important for next 6 months and the current focus is now is on safety, food and medicine. “I don’t see increase in online shopping happening. Lock down happened when our stores were filled with new stock and we foresee business will come down by 50% till next 6 months. However, it will differ from product to product,” said Mr. Bansal.
Talking about the biggest challenge post opening of the lock down Mr. Bansal shared that his marketing team will follow social distancing norms and all sales team will undergo a proper test. “Our marketing team is brainstorming about different initiatives to be undertaken. Once lock down gets over, we have divided it into three phases. First phase will be when we will initially open our showrooms with full safety norms. The second phase will be from May-September and the third from September-March. Our plans will revise from time to time,” added Mr. Bansal. The webinar was well attended by a number of students and faculty members.