Higher education must realign courses to produce more industry-ready graduates
With thousands of students graduating from professional courses every year, India is a powerhouse of young talent and human resource. However, the moot question is, are our higher educational institutions proving successful in imparting the right kind of practical and industry-related knowledge to students?
Corporate India has for long complained about the lack of employment-readiness in fresh recruits. Industry leaders have often lamented how organizations need to invest heftily in training programs even after hiring graduates from professional courses. According to the India Skills Report 2019, an annual survey conducted by a talent assessment firm and an HR technology company in association with UNDP, Association of Indian Universities (AIU), CII and AICTE concluded that the overall employability of Indian graduates stood at around 47 percent.
While engineering graduates had an employability of 57%, only around 36% of management graduates were found to be adequately employable. The successive surveys indicate that employability of Indian freshers has been increasing over the years but much more needs to be done to bridge the gap. While a majority of Indian students have sound academic and theoretical knowledge, the gap lies in their ability as fresh pass outs to implement that knowledge in practical terms. Not just practical technical skills, students are often also found lacking in sufficient interthey personal, managerial and supervisory skills.
INVEST IN LAST MILE TRAINING
While emphasizing the need for practical skills, we often tend to underestimate the importance of theoretical learning. For educational institutions, it is very important to educate students about the origin, history and evolution of any discipline. This instills much-needed depth and understanding in students about the concepts and need of their branch of study. This cannot be done without teaching them adequate theoretical background. What is often challenging is to incorporate both theoretical and practical learning into the curriculum in a way that makes this transition easy. This is where the importance of last mile training emerges.
Last mile training implies providing students an intensive practical learning environment that makes them deployable on the job from Day 1. Indian higher educational institutions must work to develop coherent last mile training programmes that provide students a close exposure to real work conditions and equip them with ready knowledge and skills needed for a job. For example, a bulk of journalism and communication gradates in India are not equipped to work on the latest editing software’s used in newspapers and television channels. This requires these organizations to spend crucial initial weeks in training recruits. Students can hit the ground running if educational institutions include teaching the latest technology and editing skills to students.
Last mile training programs bridge the gap between education and work, and minimize the friction this leap would cause. Hands on training programmes, giving students projects to implement in real time and providing effective platforms for coaching of students from industry experts are effective ways this can be done. This can be done either through summer and winter breaks or by extending the duration of courses and setting aside a semester for practical training in conjugation with industry organizations. It is important that Universities and colleges invest in training their graduating students so that the chasm between the knowledge possess and what the business world expects of them gets narrowed.
CREATE CLOSE INDUSTRY ACADEMIA TIES
To be able to fulfill the above need and to create graduates that are more job ready, a very critical requirement is the need to nurture closer ties between academia and industry. The corporate world in India has undergone a sea change in a quick span of time. With start-ups becoming the new job creators and new sectors emerging in the economy every five years, the requirements of the job market have also changed dramatically. Rapid technological disruptions imply that the shelf life of skills is lower than ever before. A 2016 study by FICCI and Ernst & Young (EY) predicted that 65 per cent of the children who joined a primary school in 2016 will end up doing jobs that don’t even exist today. With such a fast evolving job market, it is imperative upon educational institutions to institute mechanisms that constantly educate students about these changing requirements and allow the industry to help in the process.
This can be done by organizing regular interaction programmes between industry experts and students, invest in nurturing elaborate alumni networks for older students to return to their campuses and mentor the graduates. This not only helps in preparing students better for the work environment but also allows industry experts a credible way to provide their feedback to students about their industryreadiness.
DEVELOP ABILITY FOR ORIGINAL AND ANALYTICAL THINKING
A large number of students graduate in India without producing any original work of research or innovation. Many have never even written a paper or dissertation in their lives and lack the mental ability to analyze or produce a critique. This is an important element of education that we must improve. True education is one which apart from teaching existing concepts and ideas to students also enables them to better use their own critical and analytical thinking. Presenting papers, creating presentations, writing dissertations etc must be made an important element of learning in all higher educational institutions.
IMPART ESSENTIAL SOFT SKILLS
This is one area that is the most neglected. Soft skills such as ability to communicate coherently, a problem solving attitude, an ability to cooperate and work as a team are very essential elements. These are skills that organizations need desperately in their employees. However, no curriculum teaches them.
With the ever-changing job market and industry, higher education system must adapt itself to give due importance to imparting soft skills to students as well. This must be done by delegating time and workshops for students to learn team building skills, public speaking skills, effective written and oral communication skills as well as supervisory skills.