Work-Life-Study Balance and Executive Education: Case of India

 From: Millennial Asia

The skill set required by industry is changing rapidly nowadays. Continuous and periodic skills enhancement (also re-skilling) is considered important for enhanced opportunity and career growth. Also, in the age of digital transformation and technological advancement, skills must be upgraded even faster than ever before. With tech-savvy millennials adding to the workforce every year, the older employees experience a constant pressure to upgrade their technical and relevant skills. Hence, to remain relevant in today’s competitive environment, employees focus on re-skilling by undergoing part-time executive education and mainstream careers. According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), more than half of the Indian professionals (approximately 54%) need to upgrade their qualifications to keep up with the industry’s growing skill demand. According to Zairus Master (CEO, Shine Learning, a global education services provider) professionals will have to re-skill themselves every three to four years to remain relevant in a dynamic, evolving, and competitive working environment1. Working executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals are increasingly enrolling in higher education qualifications and degrees to re-skill themselves to become relevant in today’s dynamic era. Most of these professionals opt for part-time or distance learning courses. Typically, these courses have classes in the early mornings, late evenings, or on weekends. Ken Research forecasts the Executive Education market in India was estimated at USD 15 million by FY20–21 (in revenue terms), which is dominated by preference for customized MDPs, part-time programmes and high number of enrolments in eminent B-Schools2. According to the report on educational statistics (2018) by Department of Higher Education, MHRD, Government of India, 11% of the enrolment in higher education is through distance learning mode.

This trend can be easily seen by examining the demographics of higher education classrooms. The common characteristics of college students have been changing, particularly over the past decade. In addition to an increase in students, married, parents, and working simultaneously. Although re-skilling, up-skilling, or continuing higher education may sound exciting at first. However, this exposes working executives to the challenge of balancing the work-life-study interface. The study requirements can affect work and life; the demands of work can affect both life and study, and life demand can influence study and work. It is seen that going back to college significantly changes the lives of working executives, creates a disruption in their work-life balance, some of them even experience elevated levels of stress and declines in physical health. Studies have identified the importance of positive psychology to deal with issues of work-life balance arising out of long working hours and related workaholism. Similar studies in positive psychology have been done on working mothers and how they rediscover their happiness amid balancing work and family roles. Studies have suggested that researchers should further explore the emotional challenges of students balancing higher education and employment to effectively prepare them for the complexities of combining these roles.

The literature discussed work-life and life-work interaction, as the relationship is bidirectional, later researchers threw light on life-impacting work. Scholars of positive organizational psychology have emphasized studying work-life balance issues; however, the third dimension of ‘study’ was given limited attention. Research on the phenomenon of work-life-study is still in its nascent stage. Researchers studied school, work, family interaction and developed a scale for conflict measurement. Kremer also discussed the absence of antecedent and outcome study in work-life-study balance. Therefore, this article aims to understand the work-life-study interface phenomenon by qualitatively studying the lived-in experiences of executive education scholars.

This article aims to understand the unique phenomenon of the work-life-study interface by studying the lived-in experiences of executive education students qualitatively. The study aims to delivers a unique contribution by highlighting the third element of ‘study’ in Work-life balance (WLB), unlike most of the literature which is skewed towards work-life balance and largely neglects the ‘study’ aspect. Thereby, contributing to the positive organizational scholarship and providing implications for academia and industry to design interventions to help executive education students maintain work-life-study balance.