The Hindu Business Line : Education yet to make industry grade

India Inc trawling far and wide for employable graduates focuses on the key problem of an education system that has not kept pace with the needs of industry or the demands of the people. This demands greater involvement of the private sector, and a wholesale revamp of the education system, says N. RAMAKRISHNAN.

Walk along Chennai’s Marina beach early in the morning — dodging the litter and what not — you are sure to come across some fishermen. You are also sure to see some catamarans bobbing on the sea. Strike up a conversation with a fisherman, he will tell you that the catch has depleted and that he has to spend longer hours at sea, sail longer distances and cast the nets far wider and deeper if he is to come back with a reasonably good catch. No one has heard him complain that life has become more difficult. It goes on.

It is much the same with Corporate India — at least as far as the catch is concerned, of people, that is. A depleting resource base in the traditional catchment areas — major cities — and with more firms dipping in, India Inc has been forced to cast its net far and wide, covering second-rung cities and towns, and visiting and recruiting from colleges that would not have got a second glance a few years back. Not because of the quality of these institutions, but because corporates were quite comfortable with the numbers they were able to net from the educational institutions in Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Bangalore or Hyderabad. No longer.

Campus recruitment is no more confined to the top colleges alone, be they engineering or general arts and science colleges. Head-hunters say they have to sieve through hundreds of applications and candidate profiles before short-listing at least a handful for the final round of interviews, as they try hard to find the right fit of graduates.

Companies go through an elaborate filtering process, putting the candidates through different tests to find out how suitable they are for the organisation. Once the recruitment is done, the candidates are put through an even more rigorous training schedule, most often in different departments, to give them the kind of exposure they would require to take up challenging assignments.

Tier-II problems

Mr K.V. Rangaswami, Director and President (Construction), Larsen & Toubro Ltd, points to a problem the company has faced — and one that is generally felt across the spectrum — pertaining to recruitment of graduates from the non-metro institutions. Their ability to communicate in English is poor. A good working knowledge of English is a must for a company like L&T, which has projects spread across the country and in quite a few global locations too.

The company gives equal weightage to university marks, performance in the written test, group discussion and personal interview and has found that a large number of graduates from the non-metro centres perform poorly when it comes to group discussion, although their technical knowledge may be on a par with their counterparts from the major cities. A problem which then leads to a bigger issue — soft skills, which is also quite commonly heard in Corporate India.

While most refer to the lack of communication skills when they talk of soft skills, others in industry believe they are much more than the mere ability to communicate. Mr B. Santhanam, Managing Director, Saint-Gobain Glass India Ltd, says that, “a good part of the problem in soft skills is how to think.” India is a society that still does things by rote, especially in the education system.

Any discussion on soft skills should cover aspects like how to think about a problem, how to work in a team, how to take support, how to listen and how to frame the problem. “You can communicate only if your thinking process is clear. Language is a small part of communication,” says Mr Santhanam. It is in this wider definition of soft skills the education system’s role comes into sharper focus.

The fundamental definition of employability should be taken care of by educational institutions, says Prof M. Anandakrishnan, educationist and Chairman, Madras Institute of Development Studies. Which means, in his or her chosen area, the person should have “an adequate depth of knowledge and sufficient breadth of his or her role in applying this knowledge,” he says. The educational institution, therefore, has to provide graduates avenues to hone their skills and nurture them. For instance, for somebody aspiring to become a manager the educational institution should nurture leadership skills, communication skills, ability to work in teams and a whole range of such issues.

Curriculum Design

For this to happen, the curriculum design should not be too rigid and should build in enough flexibility to provide the core knowledge in the chosen subject of specialisation and associated knowledge of sufficient breadth and then the skills necessary for his or her aptitude. “It means that the curriculum remains flexible enough that not everybody goes through a single pipeline,” points out Prof Anandakrishnan. The curriculum must offer a degree of choice to the students, which almost two-thirds of the technical institutions — barring the IITs, NITs and some autonomous institutions — fail to do and put the students through a rigid pipeline.

Prof Anandakrishnan advocates a greater industry-academia interaction and suggests that industry should have a more permanent arrangement to work with academic institutions. Rather than an individual company working with an educational institution, his suggestion is that a consortium of companies could work with a group of institutions. Students who have to complete project work as part of their course should be encouraged to spend time at a chosen company as part of working on the project.

Privatisation of technical education resulted in a mushrooming of engineering colleges and consequently in the number of engineers. Till this happened, the number of diploma engineers — those who pass out of ITIs — far outnumbered the number of graduate engineers.

It would have been 10 diploma engineers to one graduate engineer. But, after privatisation and with very little investment going into vocational education and training, this ratio has got inverted. There is, therefore, a need to dramatically increase the number of diploma engineers — to fill up the jobs that do not require a graduate engineer’s qualification — which can be achieved only by inviting the private sector into area that has till now been the preserve of the government.

This, and an overhaul of the non-technical education, that of the arts and science colleges, is another pre-requisite to improve skills and make the graduates more suitable for jobs.

Prof Anandakrishnan moots a shift to a credit-based system for the arts and science colleges from the present system of marks. Any student should become eligible for a degree if he or she accumulates a specified number of credits. The curriculum should be flexible encouraging the students to learn disciplines, which normally would not fit into their course.

Liberalise Education

Mr T.V. Mohandas Pai, Director (Human Resources), Infosys Technologies Ltd, feels the remedy is in liberalising higher education, granting more autonomy to the universities, inviting foreign universities, opening up collegiate education system and allowing charging of market related fees. With an overhauled education system, industry can then train its recruits and institutionalise the training arrangement. Saint-Gobain Glass India runs regular training programmes for its employees, including those from companies to which it has outsourced some of its non-core activities.

The company has a 22-day curriculum teaching the employees basics of industrial hygiene, safety, managing discipline, and specific skills like packing, mailing and handling cranes.

“We are trying to reduce it (the training period) to 15 days so that we can turn around more people. We are trying to digitise it. We are trying to use biometrics so that if a person has done the training, we know exactly what he has gone through,” says Mr Santhanam of Saint-Gobain.

Fishermen rely largely on passing their skills from generation to generation, more from memory and experience. At least Corporate India is much better off — it has the advantage of advanced scientific tools where lessons learnt can be preserved and processes improved upon, and passed on to every batch of fresh recruit.

The Internet, as Mr Santhanam points out, has completely democratised knowledge-sharing so much so that a global company like Saint-Gobain need not look for just local benchmarks but can raise the bar ever higher by scaling the performance of its employees against the very best in its global network.