In The Spotlight

IT for an inclusive India – building a Skills-Education nexus 

Financial Express Article, 06/09/2010, Ganesh Natarajan

The war for talent that plagued every firm in the IT industry till the global economic downturn provided a welcome eighteen months of relief is back with a bang! In the first five months of the current fiscal, attrition in most IT firms has been in the region of twenty to thirty percent on an annualised basis and the revolving door syndrome has seen some companies reporting net additions of manpower in single or double digits in spite of having added several hundred new employees to their rolls. While there is no immediate redress for this unfortunate situation and strictures like avoidance of offers in colleges before the final semester and honouring of three month notice periods can at best provide temporary respite to much battered resourcing managers, the medium term solution lies in revitalising the supply pipelines with quality talent in large numbers to serve the needs of the entire services sector.

An interesting experiment underway in the city of Pune provides a glimmer of hope that collaborative efforts of industry and academia can bear fruit. A significant software services firm, hard pressed for talented Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing professionals has partnered a business school to build a steady pipeline of talent for deployment on domestic and global projects. Offered in two formats – a four month accelerated program with strong focus on business intelligence skills supported by inputs in general management and business processes and a more relaxed one year program that gives equal weightage to core management concepts and BI skills, the program has been designed to serve both the short term and ongoing needs of the firm . Graduates will have the skills to hit the ground running on the job without compromising the conceptual management skills needed to build successful program and business management careers in the long term.

The key learning from this experiment, which can so easily be replicated across a wide spectrum of technology and process expertise areas is that the historical blunder that India has made by separating vocational skills and education has to be addressed and integrated models of skills and education designed and implemented to enhance both employability and capability of young people throughout the country. The Modular Employability Scheme which was launched with much expectation and embraced by Vocational Training Institutes and Industry bodies alike has been floundering because of a lack of clarity on the jobs available to the output of these programs. On the other hand, multiple colleges and universities that dot the landscape of the nation today provide diplomas and degrees that are not worth the paper they are printed on – a clear case of neither skills development nor educational institutions serving the purpose of either generating knowledge or employability.

The solution lies in building a system that celebrates diversity and enables quality with scale across the system. Built on three fundamental precepts – a learner centric model of education, employable and contemporary skills and conceptual grounding in the subject area that is being covered, the backbone of a new transformational model will have to be technology. Technology in education is dismissed by many in the country by referring to some early failed experiments in e-learning where neither the design nor the delivery had been customised to the audience or the capabilities and limitations of the medium being used. Technology has progressed substantially in the last decade or so and the cost-effective availability of tools like CISCO’s Webex, Video Conferencing, Electronic whiteboards has enabled blended learning models to evolve, where the entire cycle of prerequisite, core, remedial and reinforcement learning is designed around expert availability in synchronous but distributed classroom sessions while commonplace concepts are delivered through asynchronous “just in time” learning models.

Nothing succeeds like access and as the internet and broadband proliferates in the country, there are some incredibly successful pilots to learn from, like the skilling and employability enablement of multiple Malaysian student batches from a centre of Global Talent Track in India or the ambitious plan of the University of Kashmir in Srinagar to enable students within and outside the campus to receive expert inputs in a range of services areas to prepare them for jobs within and across the disturbed valley. The MHRD has laudable plans in the form of Innovation Universities and the Foreign University and NCHER initiatives but nothing will be more worthy than an end to end capability in the country for an aspiring young person in remote areas to acquire skills, start working, transfer the credits from both courses and workplace learning to a formal education program and join the ranks of the educated employed and enlightened through the process of learning! The technology is there and if we can bridge the aspiration chasm, an inclusive India is well within reach!