Very often I hear and read the word "Employability" as a major
concern not just in India and emerging markets but also in the developed
economies. In most of the developed economies the same concern is paraphrased
as "21st Century Skill sets". It remains a big challenge and will
remain a big challenge and that is the nature and pace of the global economy.
The polity, the Corporate world, the educational institutes, the regulators through various seminars across have made Employability a household name. While published opinion becomes public opinion, I would like to differ based on my native experience over the last few years on ground. In the last 3-4 years I have visited extensively over 220 colleges across 30+ cities of India, interacting with over 20000 graduating students in India. And to my utmost disappointment I found Employability much below the published statistics of 21-23%.
With about 4 Million graduates coming out of India every year, and such low employability ratios, we as a young country are already staring at a large chunk of graduates under-employed or un-employed. While the job market in India not being as bad as in the developed world, the un-employability of graduates is creating a great pool of job vacancies on one hand and un-employed and under-employed graduates on the other hand.
While continuing to emphasize on Employability sometimes brings some changes at regulatory level but acceptance on implementation and compliance has its own challenges. This pool of under-employed and un-employed graduates is increasing a pace faster than our inflation, rupee depreciation and definitely impacting in enlarging the organized sector labour pool there by impacting the GDP growth. Very soon, like infrastructure has hampered GDP and its proven without doubt, lack of employable pool would become another irreplaceable and indispensable hurdle in the economic growth of the country in the short to medium term and most importantly would become a very big social problem in the medium term.
The need to of the hour is not to banter about the phrase employability but to focus on innovation. While the greatest of the innovations/inventions in the last two decades or even in past have been seeded in the institutions of higher learning in developed economies and then they have been commercialized by the corporate world, the irony in India is that the most simple and mature innovations are not accepted by the institutes to upgrade. There is an unbelievable chasm created because of this simple catching up and this gap is manifested in the products coming out of these institutions when I hear Engineering graduates applying for the post of a bus conductor or preparing for clerical exams.
This dismal scenario, soon to take monstrous social propotions, already an economic problem, need to be and can be reversed only and only through innovations driven by institutions and not be preparing students on employability, for we have missed the bus of employability. Employability is a passé, Innovation holds the key. The reason is that only Innovations can spread and proliferate at a rapid pace and bring everyone to the steam quickly. Eg. an innovation like Facebook, Google has overnight made people computer literate across the globe irrespective of the geo-political landscape. Mobile phones have brought literates and illiterates on par in terms of communication and have made post cards or telegrams redundant. We need to focus on many such innovations which would adapt to the haves of the people in general rather than discriminating people on basis of haves or have not by ranting out the oft repeated jargon called "EMPLOYABILITY".
The polity, the Corporate world, the educational institutes, the regulators through various seminars across have made Employability a household name. While published opinion becomes public opinion, I would like to differ based on my native experience over the last few years on ground. In the last 3-4 years I have visited extensively over 220 colleges across 30+ cities of India, interacting with over 20000 graduating students in India. And to my utmost disappointment I found Employability much below the published statistics of 21-23%.
With about 4 Million graduates coming out of India every year, and such low employability ratios, we as a young country are already staring at a large chunk of graduates under-employed or un-employed. While the job market in India not being as bad as in the developed world, the un-employability of graduates is creating a great pool of job vacancies on one hand and un-employed and under-employed graduates on the other hand.
While continuing to emphasize on Employability sometimes brings some changes at regulatory level but acceptance on implementation and compliance has its own challenges. This pool of under-employed and un-employed graduates is increasing a pace faster than our inflation, rupee depreciation and definitely impacting in enlarging the organized sector labour pool there by impacting the GDP growth. Very soon, like infrastructure has hampered GDP and its proven without doubt, lack of employable pool would become another irreplaceable and indispensable hurdle in the economic growth of the country in the short to medium term and most importantly would become a very big social problem in the medium term.
The need to of the hour is not to banter about the phrase employability but to focus on innovation. While the greatest of the innovations/inventions in the last two decades or even in past have been seeded in the institutions of higher learning in developed economies and then they have been commercialized by the corporate world, the irony in India is that the most simple and mature innovations are not accepted by the institutes to upgrade. There is an unbelievable chasm created because of this simple catching up and this gap is manifested in the products coming out of these institutions when I hear Engineering graduates applying for the post of a bus conductor or preparing for clerical exams.
This dismal scenario, soon to take monstrous social propotions, already an economic problem, need to be and can be reversed only and only through innovations driven by institutions and not be preparing students on employability, for we have missed the bus of employability. Employability is a passé, Innovation holds the key. The reason is that only Innovations can spread and proliferate at a rapid pace and bring everyone to the steam quickly. Eg. an innovation like Facebook, Google has overnight made people computer literate across the globe irrespective of the geo-political landscape. Mobile phones have brought literates and illiterates on par in terms of communication and have made post cards or telegrams redundant. We need to focus on many such innovations which would adapt to the haves of the people in general rather than discriminating people on basis of haves or have not by ranting out the oft repeated jargon called "EMPLOYABILITY".
3 comments:
Every innovation needs 100's if not thousands of employable people to succeed and sustain itself. Google, Facebook etc employ thousands of people today so I think employability is also very important. I think where we are failing is our education system is only about passing exams and not about picking up skills. After 15 -16 years of education most college pass outs do not have any useful skill ( if anything some learn dancing, singing in college)
If we can teach students to think, write, create on their own instead of asking them to learn answers to 20 questions each semester to pass the exam we will be a much better off
I'm truly in support of Srinivas..cz at the end of the day we do nothing but finding out strategies to mug up our lessons..
..well thought Gaurav..and apprecite the comments of Srinivas and Gargi....let the manthan be on ..this itself will propell a lot
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