Saturday, December 07, 2013

Students & their employability

Employability is the major issue in today’s world. There are (management & engineering) colleges which are below average quality. Students coming from those colleges have to struggle to get the jobs. If the student is struggler and has the fighting spirit, he may get the job. He then can build his career on this. However in those colleges, there are few students who really want to learn. Those few students are talented, good and really are in search of good opportunities. (Talented means, a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied.  When they get the opportunity, they value the job.) Unfortunately Industries tend to pick candidates from reputed institutes which is not wrong, but there is no point hiring the candidate from reputed institute with big cost for shop floor routine job and keeping the guy for only doing the routine job. I personally feel that these students should be really challenged and should be rotated through different functions and finally put them result oriented high level tasks. You really come to know the capabilities of the candidate.

Students from Tier 1 schools, in particular, are definitely more prepared, but when you talk about value for the money, and you talk about value per unit of money spent on a particular candidate or the efficiency level per unit of the money spent on a candidate, there is no major difference if you compare it other schools. When a new MBA comes in from one of the top institutes, “he has bought some level of premium tag”, but that does not mean this candidate will have the most or best practical knowledge.

Jobs like supervisor,  regular maintenance, logistics, , QA, regular production etc. where, there are routine jobs as per the standard operating procedures do not demand high level intelligence. however, they do require greater frustration tolerance, personal discipline, organization, management, and interpersonal skills than were required two decades and more ago. These are precisely the skills that many of the young people, who are in business schools today, as opposed to two decades ago, lack. 

India’s school and university-based education system doesn’t equip you with skills that employers look for.  While Indian graduates know something about the theoretical aspects, they lack domain skills, communication and professional (employability) skills. (see the exhibit)  Curriculum and pedagogy at teaching institutions are increasingly being set by people who do not understand what companies want. Most of the times, teachers’ quality is the major issues. Those teachers are the people, who fail to get good industrial and professional jobs. As the last option the teaching profession is accepted. There is not such passion of teaching.

Even the attitude of students is different. They spend big money for getting the degree certificate, sometimes they even don’t know why they are doing the particular degree. Their expectations is if they are spending such amount they would get the highly paid job with air-conditioned office. Third class management institutes made this totally business case to earn the money without any value addition.

Institutes should focus on following areas while preparing their students for industries. Otherwise all those institutes will perish one day.  

Skills :  Skill is the how part of the task and job. It is also capabilities that can be transferred from one person to another. This can be actually done by aligning with industries. Institutes need to take efforts to reach out to industries, understand the expectations and prepare the curriculum accordingly.

Knowledge: It is ‘what you are aware of .. Factual ( things you know) Can & should be taught. Experiential (understandings you have picked up along the way). Less Tangible and therefor much harder to teach

Talent: Recurring patterns of thought feeling behavior, that carve individual minds. If someone does not have the talent as part of his filter , then very difficult for others to inject it.
Now just look how many candidates have above capabilities. I think there is a long way to reach the goal.   

Exhibits:







5 comments:

Couvery said...

The problem with the education system is that it helps students to educate only but they are not taught to utilize their education in practical manner and that's why they lack for employ-ability as a result there are many institutes help students to provide on job training or internship that help in making them employable.

K.Manickam said...

Employability in terms of acquiring input ,materials collected and compiled for various topics for presentation and the presentation skills are given adequate focus in various schools , but in reality such attempts fail to pass the test of in-depth knowledge for effective handling of the critical areas. It is this gap need to be bridged by Academic Institutions to improve the employability factor among the students. Academics and Industries to work together to build capability and competency level of students. In my view students can be asked to chose industry of his choice and build capability for employability with the assistance of Institutes

Hindrik Koning said...

Below in Dutch a note on the devaluation in numbers, in level will follow.
Onze eigen industrie heeft hier hard aan meegewerkt door rechtstreeks in te gaan op de waarschuwing van mensen die dit zagen aankomen. Denken aan verplaatsing van deze kapitaalintensive naar de lage lonen landen was geruststellend.
Maar zo gemakelijk is het niet deze industrie te verplaatsen, opbouwen op een nieuw locatie en afbouwen op de oude lokatie is om verschillende redenen lastig, het uitfaseren van een installatie komt in de buurt van de levensduur (30-40) voor de grotere installaties.
Daarnaast heeft ook deze industrie zijn opleidings faciliteiten op de stoep te zetten, zonder er rekening mee te houden dat enige nascholling in de chemie nodig is om reden dat erg specifiek is. In het Zuid Westen (Rotterdam) heeft men dit goed opgang gericht op het onderhoud daarnaast hoopt men met Kennis en Asset management enige verbeterslagen te maken.

Dit laatste is interessant omdat met het optuigen van een fors stukje informatisering en automatisering we op mankracht kunnen besparen.
De verbeteringen rond de automatische regelingen van de processen zelf (er is nog best veel te doen) hebben we meetkamer kunnen integreren en is het aantal bedienings posten per x regelingen afgenomen geven aan dat dit doenlijk is en best wat oplevert.
Managers hebben pech heel hard roepen (schreewen) morgen klaar, en powerpoints rond strooien helpt ook niet, rustig en ingetogen beginnen met vertrouwen op de uitvoerende diest, maar vooral doorzetten geeft resultaat.

De chemische industrie is gebonden aan het aantrekkelijk maken van het werken in die omgeving. Dus zullen ook zij de eigen omgeving aantrekkelijk moeten maken (stabiliteit) en met een stukje marketing tegelijkertijd de imaginaire muur rond deze industrie weg te nemen

Vinod Bidwaik said...

Dear All,

Please see the translation of Dutch version of comments of Hindrik Koning as under
____________________________
Our own industry has worked hard to achieve by going directly to the warning from people who saw this coming. Thinking of moving this capital intensive to low- wage countries was reassuring .
But it is not so comfortably move this industry to build a new location, and finished at the old location is difficult for several reasons , the phasing out of a plant is near the lifespan ( 30-40 ) for larger installations .
In addition, also to set without taking into account that some nascholling in chemistry is required to reason that is very specific. Educational facilities are on the doorstep this industry In the South West (Rotterdam ) has been this good entrance to the maintenance also hoped to make . Improvement only succeed with Knowledge and Asset Management

The latter is interesting because we can save . Rigging with a sharp piece of computerization and automation of manpower
The improvements around the automatic control of the process itself (there is still quite a lot to do) , we chamber can integrate and control the number of posts x schemes conducted indicate that this is feasible and what is best yields .
Managers have bad luck really hard call ( schreewen ) ready tomorrow , and powerpoints scatter does not help calm and subdued start to rely on the executive diest , but especially by putting produces results .

The chemical industry is bound to the use of the work in that environment. Attractive So they too will have to make their own environment ( stability) and attractive at the same time to remove the imaginary wall around this industry with a bit of marketing

Anil said...

Hey Vinod thanks for this valuable info. Proven helpful.

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