The Hindu Business Line : How to make graduates more employable

Schools and colleges need to realise how important overall development of the individual is. Only then will young Indian graduates become more employable.

FUTURE BECKONS: Learnable and teachable skills such as speaking clearly and grammatically with proper pronunciation are one thing, but attitude to customers or colleagues and a natural concern for other people's feelings and needs are quite a different matter. Those are really at the heart of any customer responsive business, and indeed civilised society, and must come from the heart.

I don't know if you have noticed it, but there's a distinct buzz in the air these days, not just with the daily news of the dizzying Sensex heights, but also the fact that company annual results in the past few weeks have been almost uniformly heartening, leading to an understandable, rational exuberance.

And yet (as always there is a qualifier) are individual managers in the middle and senior rungs of the organisations happy, comfortable and relaxed? Oh no, on the contrary, if anything, the pressure to perform and compete has just gone up a further notch. Targets are bound to become more expansive and the leadership of companies, not content with a 30 or 40 per cent increase in profits during the past year will only, like Oliver Twist, ask for more.

Now you might say this is also understandable, at any rate human. But watch what happens when you consider the following factors taken together: India is becoming more and more of a service economy. Product differentials are getting harder to come by. Service therefore must become a distinctive difference. Service has to be delivered by the people for the people. Nothing else matters because technology is open and visible to all. The war for talent is much in the news. No one seems to be able to stem the floodtide of departures for greener pastures as salaries are soaring.

And yet, everyone is bemoaning the unemployables amongst our so-called educated youth. The tallest captains of our giant ICT institutions clearly want employable, technically qualified graduates in their hundreds of thousands and they do get a million applications. Yet, both they and the peripheral companies are still unhappy with how raw at the edges these trainees are.

The situation is more acute in the other metal-bending industries and traditional avenues of employment; and worse in the ICT-enabled services, where even the "plain graduates", as they are colloquially referred to, would find placement quite easily — if only they were reasonably intelligent, presentable and can speak properly and make sense of instructions. Aye, there's the rub!

In survey after survey, we come up with the predictable finding: what graduates lack very badly are `communication skills' and `soft skills' or people-related skills. Employment in the customer-facing businesses, especially where they are of foreign origin, places much emphasis on the verbal, linguistic and cognitive ability (which is jargon for intelligence measured in the classic IQ tests). In other words, not brilliance or scientific knowledge so much as the ability to understand quickly, convey meaning simply and clearly and speak one's mind when needed.

Over and above it all is the rarest trait in Indian education, alas, the capacity to think independently and critically; that is to say, given a report or a situation, to know what questions to ask, whom to refer to if needed and what to look for in a solution — and apply one's mind, not one's memory power! Sadly, not even the HR specialists seem to appreciate the difference between what they can redress and what they cannot.

What education system lacks

Here is the crux of the matter: our education in most schools, with the possible exception of a few, does not encourage or call for the exercise of this set of skills.

Looking back, nearly all schools used to have, years ago, a weekly ritual of a general essay, a composition or classroom debate on randomly chosen topics, including ones calling for extempore speech for a few minutes. All these were, of course, much dreaded and made fun of by us as students in our playful early teens, but one must admit that these exercises were directed precisely at the very skills now found so sorely lacking in college graduates.

Collecting one's thoughts on a subject, thinking of points both for and against a topic, meeting objections and presenting it logically, briefly and interestingly, keeping the audience interest in mind are what traditional essay-style answers and debating used to call for — which are missing particularly in the highly educated engineering and accounting types.

And these are precisely the skills that every job demands more and more these days, especially if the tasks involve meeting customers and selling or handling objections, complaints or service issues. Everyone from a part-time insurance agent to a VP in Marketing needs exactly these basic strengths at the core of the job — only the industry and company related specifics differ.

Courtesy, consideration for others

There is one more reason for the shortfall between expectation and actual in the communication skill area. We as a country have begun to lose all our traditional virtues of courtesy, consideration for others and manners, or so it seems when you look around you and observe the behaviour of people — both service providers and customers — in public places.

You see this on board aircrafts, trains and buses, in shops and restaurants, regardless of the class or affluence level. It is as though rudeness and discourtesy (not to mention anger and irritability) are the hallmarks of a person's importance. This is matched only by the apathy, arrogance and sheer ignorance of some of the frontline service staff. As one can see, not all of these traits are easily changed by training. Some indeed might be too deeply ingrained and impossible to alter.

Therefore, to think of communication skills as something that can be put on, like a corporate uniform, on top of one's educational qualification, is too simplistic. Until the schools and colleges realise just how important the overall development of the individual is, it is unlikely that we shall see much perceptible improvement in the employability of graduates.

In other words, learnable and teachable skills such as speaking clearly and grammatically with proper pronunciation and so on are one thing, but attitude to customers or colleagues and a natural concern for other people's feelings and needs (which is a simple definition of good manners) are quite a different matter.

Those are really at the heart of any customer responsive business, and indeed civilised society, and must come from the heart. If they are not ingrained, but thought of as a set of tricks to be acquired in a one-week induction programme, it will be just a fraud and seen to be so.

(The writer, a former Director of IFMR, is a management consultant.)

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