AUGUST 13, 2018 INDIA TODAY 57Over 350 million children attend some
educational institution. What drives
them to school is the hope that educa-
tion will open doors to a better life.
While huge efforts are being made in
the field of education—several govern-
ment, state and private educational
initiatives, the Right to Education Act,
the National Skill Development Mis-
sion, increasing allocations for educa-
tion and so on—70 per cent of our
educated youth remain unemployable,
while the skills deficit rises to almost
90 per cent in professional courses.
The problem is not just a matter of
raising literacy levels and of ensuring a
wider educational experience based on
learning and knowledge, but a complex
web of social and economic issues re-
lating to societal pressure, inadequate
infrastructure, poor quality of teach-
ers, outdated syllabus, and much else.
It is also one that requires a thorough
transformation of the higher education
system and a reorientation and reas-
sessment of all academic programmes
so as to enable students to develop
skills that have economic value content
beyond the specialised knowledge and
expertise, to function effectively in a
dynamic and technologically enabled
global workplace.
In other words, we need to pause,
disconnect and re-format.
To begin with, pedagogy needs to
change. Today, a majority of students
are victims of poor teaching. So tuition
factories flourish, where exam survival
skills are taught instead of real know-
ledge. There is little learning for the
sake of knowledge, expertise or inter-
est. The examination system kills any
creativity and innovation as all that is
required is bookish knowledge—often
outdated and irrelevant—regurgitated
during exam time. So students come
out of schools and college with little or
no real knowledge, limited reading,
even less communication skills and an
inability in problem-solving and criti-
cal thinking. We are making students
“reprographic machines and cassette
recorders”, as one academician put it.
The gap in skills training is enor-
mous—problem-solving skills, logical
reasoning, language comprehension,
general knowledge and data inter-
pretation. Life skills needed to enter
the world of work are totally missing
from our curriculum. Schools have
become marks-generating factories.
Soft skills are an important require-
ment in today’s job industry, but they
are routinely ignored in educational
institutes.
A few simple ways to build soft
skills:
lProblem-solving exercises couldbe applied to everyday situations in
school/ college
lLanguage learning could be tested
for spoken and listening skills
lThe use of English, in particular, can
be incentivised in schools and colleges
lExtra-curricular activities can be en-
couraged to generate broad knowledge
across domains as well as social and
interpersonal skills
The disconnect between education
and industry is another important
aspect. Broadly speaking, employers
look for a mix of aptitude, language,
personality and domain skills for vari-
ous roles in their organisations. If an
IT major like Infosys hiring computer
science engineers from top institutes
still needs to put them through months
of industry training, it is not surprising
that many MNCs find qualified gradu-
ates unemployable. Let alone profes-
sional qualifications, even students of
commerce or management fall weak in
the theoretical and conceptual knowl-
edge of their domain.
Undergraduate courses have not
changed for years and students who
need to keep pace with a dynamic eco-
nomic world hurtling ahead are forced
to study syllabuses that have been deep
frozen for decades. Since technology is
transforming the workplace, requiring
greater technical skills for a growing
number of jobs, there is a need to reori-
ent the academic programmes to help
students develop necessary skills and
expertise to function effectively.
Therefore, course revision is essen-
tial, with a focus on product develop-
ment, project work , research, etc. and
stronger connections with industry to
enable not only the effective transfer of
innovative technologies and product
concepts, but one which can also trans-
late into jobs and greater synergies
between education and the job market.
Few educational programmes
incorporate internship into the cur-
riculum, and commercial organisa-
tions shirk their responsibility in
exposing students to the workplace.GUEST COLUMN
O
70 per cent of our
educated youth remain
unemployable while
the skills deficit rises
to almost 90 per cent
in the case of
professional courses