Classpath issue: Jar file not recognised from EAR in Websphere Liberty Deployment - noclassdeffounderror

Question

I am using Websphere liberty profile network deployment 20.0.6 for deploying my application (EAR) application. Before that my application runs fine in websphere traditional 8.5.5 and 9.0.0. But While deploying the application on liberty (by placing ear file in dropins), I am getting classpath problems. All the required .jar files are present in the .ear but it's unable to detect a class present inside AdminConsole jar(that jar is present in ear file). There are five EJB modules which are dependent on each other and some utility jar files inside ear file. But still I am getting NoClassDefFoundError for AdminConsole and application doesn't start
The details of the error message -
[6/15/21 9:33:37:835 IST] 00000029 com.ibm.ws.logging.internal.impl.IncidentImpl                I FFDC1015I: An FFDC Incident has been created: "java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/iitap/adminconsole/export/ent/service/IEAdminSQLExecutor com.ibm.ws.app.manager.module.internal.SimpleDeployedAppInfoBase 535" at ffdc_21.06.15_09.33.37.0.log
[6/15/21 9:33:37:835 IST] 00000029 om.ibm.ws.app.manager.ear.internal.EARApplicationHandlerImpl E CWWKZ0106E: Could not start web application (ApplicationaName).[6/15/21 9:33:37:835 IST]
00000029 com.ibm.ws.app.manager.AppMessageHelper                      E CWWKZ0002E: An exception occurred while starting the application . The exception message was: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/iitap/adminconsole/export/ent/service/IEAdminSQLExecutor
If I am copying the .jar files into the Application server's lib, then its working fine for few class but since the application has transitive dependencies the error shifts on another class not found. Even I tried to modify Manifest.MF file but not working.
The structure of ear file is -
Application EAR
|
|_____Jar files
|
|_____WAR file
|
|__META-INF
| |
| |__MANIFEST.MF
|
|__WEB-INF
|
|__lib
|__classes
|__scripts
Is there any classpath I need to set somewhere in websphere libert configuration file so that the server could take it up from there. I would really appreciate your suggestion/information on this issue.