For Dilip Puri – founder and CEO , Indian School of Hospitality – a visit to Lausanne, to admit his younger son to the Swiss city’s famed school of hospitality management, opened his eyes. “When I saw the quality of education there, I said, ‘That’s what India lacks.’”Puri maintains it’s not just about running a hotel, or supervising a kitchen; it’s about trying to ensure that graduates are industry-ready. “What ISB is to Hyderabad, I want to make ISH to Gurgaon, and create a hospitality brand which transcends hospitality,” says this former MD (South Asia) of Starwood Hotels and Resorts.“In our traditional higher education, teaching soft skills, life skills and social skills is not even considered to be part of the responsibility of the college. Whereas for us at ISH, it’s such an integral part of our entire education philosophy,” he said.When the Marriott-Starwood merger was announced, I said to myself, “There’s no better time to transition my career from a corporate professional to an entrepreneur.” And I saw that vocationalising every aspect of higher education is one of the gaps in India that need to be filled. Because, in a typical liberal arts college, or any good college here, there is no concept of internships, or working with industry – you finish a three-year degree, you look for a job, and you do your Masters in something. That, essentially, was what I looked to change.I was a corporate hotelier who set out to set up a business . Today, one of my greatest passions is to facilitate learning. I’m (also) a part of our academic faculty – this allows me to stay close to my students, it allows me to practice an approach where all the knowledge I have gained, over my 33 years in the corporate world, I am able to contextualise and therefore facilitate their learning better. And it’s never too late to learn – I do courses every second day online, just to keep my own learnings updated.The problem in India has been that colleges offer hotel management, which means you’re restricting your career to hotels. There are so many more things you can do with food than just cook, which can become career choices. Still, a very talented chef is not necessarily a successful chef. Similarly, most successful chefs are not necessarily great chefs. If you want to be a successful chef, you’ve got to learn how to monetise your talent, you have to think entrepreneurially, you have to understand business. And a lot of our culinary infrastructure is geared towards building entrepreneurship in F&B.You don’t need academics, you need industry experts who are trained to facilitate learning. Industry interface with academia is critical to the success of both. We spend so much time with the kids, more to tell them what to prep for when they go to industry. And we tell industry the same. We tell them, “This is what our students have learnt in the first year, your job now as the employer – when they come for internship – is to make sure they can apply these learnings in industry.” Whereas industry would typically say, “Oh, interns equal casual labour so let’s get them to work.” If we were to improve the whole internship experience of students, the graduate profile will improve on its own.

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