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The fragile talent bridge


The biggest grouse of companies of today is the talent that comes out of institutes of great pedigree fall woefully short of vocational needs. The academically excellent candidates need a lot of time to transition from the desks of their classrooms to cubicles of workplace. In times like now startups are the order of the day and small and medium enterprises are looking for trained resources that can be deployed in the shortest time possible. The academia does not seem to be equipped to provide such talent. This is always going to be the case in a country where schools are run by academicians and companies are run by corporates.

I will limit the scope of this discussion to technical schools and the talent that come out of it. Technical schools today provide talent that have academic highfliers. But these astute students do not always translate into becoming great employees. They may become great employees eventually but when a company is looking for readily deployable resources then the student at 99 percentile may still not fit the bill. A task at a workplace comes with different vagaries where problem solving takes a different dimension all together. Solutions may not always be available in a manual or with your superior. If constant handholding is the only way forward project completions might become long and cumbersome. This has huge cascading implications. The company may stand to lose clients in some cases where competition is stiff and hence adherence to timelines is almost a given.

Our education system today doesn’t offer a lot of deviation from linear thinking. The need of the hour is not 100% attendance at institutes but a need to take students out of the comfort of a classroom. The best method of selection hence is an internship model where the student gets to spend some time under the tutelage of someone and scales up. The company and the student are in a position to decide whether it is a marriage made in heaven or not. In other circumstances a fresh hire from a school has little clue as to what he or she can expect from a corporate and his or her institute most definitely did not prepare him or her for what’s going to happen in an office.

Somewhere schools have to wake up to this fact. After the mushrooming of engineering schools at a rapid pace there is soon going to be a consolidation phase. Schools that are going to sustain will have a cutting edge over others. The employability of these students is going to be way higher than the others. It will be a greater help to India as a nation if universities sat up and started taking notice of this. It is a tough question for them to answer. As academicians do they produce engineers that are good in their stream of choice or should the engineers be more industry relevant. If you ask me, the answer is a mixture of both of the above. The curriculum should be designed in such a way that the generic parts are covered extensively and schools should be offered time and flexibility to vocationally train students so that aspirations are directed in the right way. This helps companies to tap into readily deployable talent minimizing the gestation period for ROI. This can be done only with the deepening of ties between the industry and academia to which the academia has to be more welcoming and the industry readily investing.

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