Employable?
Posted by Ninad on November 13, 2009 under All Posts | 
7 Comments to Read
Recently, the State Bank of India advertised for 11,000 clerical posts. It received a staggering 3.4 million applications!
With roughly 300 applications for every vacancy, SBI is now planning to conduct exams in 83 centres over 6 sessions. This exercise is estimated to cost around Rs. 560m (approx. USD 13m), which will be recovered from the applicants.
Although the minimum qualification for the job is Class 12, many of the applicants are engineers and MBAs.
There have been many reports which suggest that only one in four graduates from colleges in India is employable. A NASSCOM study also concluded that most of the 400,000 engineers who graduate every year do not have required technical skills or fluency in English.
So, what is the solution?
Clearly, a university graduation in India is not enough to make a student employable. A lot more needs to be done.
A student needs to continually add skills in addition to his university studies. These could be in the form of learning IT skills or even learning communication and presentation skills.
Summer internship with companies will also help students to get the relevant industry experience during their vacations.
In addition, a proper vocational experience will help a student to become truly professional. In the Western countries, more than half the students who graduate have vocational experience. In India, it is in single digits.
Unless and until a student graduating from a University in India gets a holistic experience, he will not become employable. Till such time, we will continue to see millions apply for jobs in State Bank of India, for which they are clearly over-qualified.
Ayan said,
To make our graduates employable, we need a complete change in the education system. Today, memory based education gets higher priority than learning & application based education. Simultaneously our academic institutions have to have more accountability towards the output they generate. Private participation in education may bring in better competition among institutions resulting higher quality of output. Taking a cue from Telecom and Insurance sectors, our policy makers should create an open education system under a regulatory body. Basic school education till 10th standard could remain under state/central control as it is today. Once it becomes market driven, players will be more serious in improving the benchmarks as we could see in the business education space in US and Europe today. Ultimately competition will benefit the consumer. That could probably change this scene of “potential under-employment”.
Rejoe Francis said,
I truly agree to what Mr. Karpe and Mr. Ayan say.. Though I am a very small almost spot in a corporate world compared to the 2 writers above me, i can vouch for what Mr. Ayan said about memory based education. I have myself been a victim of such kind of a system once upon a time. Though I have been a good team player and through professional in my work I have been denied many opportunities just due to not having had answers for some questions put forth during my initial campus days of struggle for a career.. There are many people today with excellent practical knowledge and sufficient academic knowledge but are struggling to be at the right place. At the same time there are people who may have no practical knowledge but only good marks/percentage at academics and are eating away into the large share of the corporate world. Well I dont know how much WE can do about this.. But surely it would be fair if we could have a better system of judging true potential in an individual. And this could be started and driven only by Technocrats and Insustry Stalwarts sitting at big positions in the corporate world… And then the world would follow… This is just my thought.. Hope to hear more from you…
Sandip said,
Dear Sir;
The main reason of the mis-match of job vs qualification is privatization of Engineering colleges. They have produced a lot of engineers, werein the intake of these private colleges are donation driven and not screened for the ability of the candidate to take up the engineering program.
Subbu said,
Not sure if Education is seen as anything other than “money making” by the ‘providers’ of education. This trend was started long back when all engineering and medical institutes were floated by Politicians, partly to garner visibility for their social responsibilities but mainly to usurp land in the name of the institutes. The fad has now moved into management institutes and even in basic primary, secondary and higher secondary education. I dont pretend to know the answer to Ninad’s post but believe that entry barriers to prevent ‘wrong hands’ in this ‘business’ and participation of unimpeachable personalities at every state to monitor and channelise curriculum to aid ‘employability’ of students could be a start… Private participation is quite obviously the answer but the trend might put the cost of education steadily beyond the reach of the ‘aam aadmi’….
Myron Anthony said,
It is true that our educational system needs a revamp, however along with it we need to revamp our mindsets as well.
The 1st stage of schooling starts at home and it is here that Parents & Relatives need to change their mindsets.
Knowing things by heart is not the only criteria for a person to be deemed intelligent. It is important to focus on concept implementation from an early stage.
Society has created a hype around rote learning resulting in a rat race and everyone just focusing on memorising.
Improving social skills from childhood goes a long way in helping build good communication and social skills.
Reading, being a part of a social group etc help provide the right atmosphere to hone these skills. Also emphasising on speaking correct english will help us unlock our potential in this age of globalisation.
So lets ensure that we on our part encourage & educate people on theses aspects.
shamkant said,
Dear Ninad,
Some time I go for teaching MMS students of HR subject. I was also involved in admission process of MMS students.
My observation is that Faculty / professor can do much to make students employable, but unfortunatley these professors / faculty themseves lack the qualities. Even some of the professors are not up to the mark and average quality is also far off. They just can not be compared with subject matter experts. Policy makers at these institute does not involve their faculties / professors in decision making process and they do not have much scope for industrial exposures.
Fortunately, lot of educational institutes are now trying to revamp their teaching methodology and adding industrial flavour to it. But progress is slow.
Same is with colleges of under-graduation and graduation level.
At my personal level, wherever I get opportunity, I educate the new generation and explain them what is expected from them.
post secondary schooling said,
[...] be used for post-secondary schooling. You are locked into the investments chosen by the plan …Employable? | Reforming EducationThere have been many reports which suggest that only one in four graduates from colleges in India is [...]
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