Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The story of the storytellers

Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin Einstein Varghese If Chetan Bhagat didn’t do enough to inspire me and confuse me, Sidin Vadukut has just taken it to another level. Let me tell you a little bit about the “CAT” grind. Any averagely informed MBA seeker will realize that there are 6 institutes located in 6 different places of India that abbreviate to 3 letters and one has to master an entrance test, again abbreviated to three letters, to get through the portals of the apex institutes of the management world in India. Once you join a coaching centre it pretty much becomes clear that if the picture of IIM Ahmedabad does not feature next to your beloved family deities then you aren’t really serious about your classes in these institutes which will put you through a psychological toughness that is required to endure 2 hours which will largely constitute inability to answer most questions. Once you come out you feel like shit and feel much better when you see the thousand odd students ...
9 comments
Read more

Why Chelsea?

I’ve often held this grouse against Liverpool and Manchester United’s fans that when you tend to have a discussion with them they bring out the reference of the “glory” days of the clubs. Man U in some respects have continued their supremacy owing to the twin factors of a tenacious manager and some poor performances of their rivals. But Liverpool as long as I have followed the league have been very patchy. They throw in some brilliant unstoppable performances some times and play utterly clueless football at other times. There is no denying the glorious history of the club. They have been the club with the most number of premier league titles and a history that’s etched in stone and full of achievements. If anybody does begin giving me a lesson on the history of football where the club that I follow features very little in, one would still find an ardent listener in me, because ‘we love this game'. But to all those people who have followed the glory days of Arsenal and Liverpool,...
3 comments
Read more

Have you been a victim of attraction?

Have you been a victim of attraction? It is so tempting that even if u are made of steel, u’ve got to sway. It’s irresistible. It is seductive. It keeps luring you away. Attraction is usually for something, for example you are attracted to a particular object or person. Attainment of the same isn’t half as fulfilling as what attraction does to us. That’s why Hope is such a wonderful thing. It keeps us in a dream land of belief that someday things will change. The concept of some day is so fantastic that it, in most cases, will lead you to inaction. The “some day” has to be created by you. Hoping is just the odor. The actual thing is the source of the sweetness. Odor just has a marijuana effect, hence fighting it is tremendously difficult. You need guts to overcome the lure of attraction. It is fancy to dream big but if you don’t know your route to achievement then your dream is just a movie that has flown you away one minute and crash lands you the next. But attraction in itself isn’...
2 comments
Read more