The Hindu Business Line : Now, education to go Twenty20

Twenty20 seems to have established an intimate connection with India. First, the former President created a vision that India will become a developed nation by 2020. Now, the Indian cricket team has won the first Twenty20 World Cup. And next, it may be the turn of education to adopt the magic number. Here is why?

Talent crunch has become a topic as clichéd and boring as the traffic problem in Mumbai. The corporate sector seems to have already accepted it and is now beginning to deal with the issues. There are several examples already.

Since IT sector was the first to feel the heat, Infosys, Wipro and other IT majors started providing study programme and other resources to engineering colleges to help them improve standards.

Now, the initiatives are coming from sectors beyond IT. Recently, ICICI Prudential got few B-Schools together to create an insurance training programme that meets their requirements. They have asked the B-Schools to popularise and deliver the programmes while ICICI Pru will guarantee placements. It is a win-win for everyone. ICICI Pru not only gets trained resources but it may in-fact incur lower hiring costs. Students get relevant education and guaranteed jobs at a fee lower than the MBA degree, which might have been their only alternative course of action. Education providers get another source of revenue. CRISIL, on the other hand, has started their own credit analytics programme. There are examples of several other approaches.

Industry growth

But most of these efforts will still not be sufficient since the current industry growth rates mean that we need people in thousands. Education sector, therefore, has to gear up and innovate to help the situation. So what does industry need? Two key requirements; one, we need large numbers, therefore, we need more scalable and quicker education delivery mechanism. Two, we need people to have specific, job relevant skills. It means we need courses that are narrow but relatively deeper and specifically targeted towards a particular job. This means current programmes need to change.

MBA education space

Consider the MBA education space. The two-year MBA degree was designed to produce business leaders and senior managers but for bulk of the one lakh MBAs that we produce, MBA is merely a mechanism to find the first job. As an education for entry-level professionals it takes too long (two years) and does not give them specific skills relevant in the first job (it was not designed to) and, hence, fails the industry on both the crucial parameters. Even for the students it is not the most cost or time efficient mechanism to be employable and to earn salaries that range between 2-3 lakhs.

Market works! And we are already seeing changes in the MBA education with the emergence of several one-year MBA programmes being launched that are generally focused on people who have already gained significant work experience. This is an attempt to create a pool of middle level managers in a shorter time frame and, hence, is a good trend.

Entry-level jobs

To address the requirements of entry level jobs and those of fresh graduates, we need is to create 3-6 month programmes focused on narrow technical and communication skills. The programmes need to be narrow in focus so the delivery time can be crunched and to ensure that fresh graduates can absorb the knowledge. So the MBA degree that went from two years to 50 weeks (cricket equivalent of a one-day format), now needs to go 20/20 by adopting a 20 weeks format. The same needs to happen in engineering and other fields. Not everyone needs to do a full four-year degree. The emphasis has to shift to shorter diplomas and to ITI.

At IMS, we have launched IMS PROSchool which aims to launch several such programmes. We have already introduced the first programme in the area of “financial planning”. This programme imparts technical skills in the areas of investment, insurance, taxation, estate and retirement planning as well as train students on business communication and selling skills.

The programme helps students get a start in the financial services field and they can add an MBA later in their careers for more generic skills. We plan to launch this programme in 40 cities and produce 2,500 students annually, which will still not be enough to fill the 50,000 vacancies projected by the industry. We are convinced there is a huge need for similar programs in the areas of financial analytics, retail, marketing analytics etc. and we will launch these soon. Other educational service providers are designing similar programmes.

“So I am sure the Twenty20 will find its feet in education. The key issue in getting these programmes established as quality programmes is changing the mindsets of students and their parents. Most of the new shorter programmes will be certificate programmes and will not be considered prestigious. But we need to appreciate that having industry relevant skills today is more crucial than earning meaningless degrees. Earlier a degree could open doors for you, but today there are umpteen jobs and the issue is “what can you do for the company”. It has taken an Indian win to kick off the Twenty20 cricket format in India; it will take a few success stories in careers to establish these new courses as well. As education providers we are aware of that and willing to work for it.

(The author is the Chief Operating Officer of Mumbai-based IMS Learning Resources Pvt Ltd)

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