Preamble
A few years back, when IIM
Kozhikode was being instituted, there was a meeting of academics and
industrialists held in IIT Delhi with a proportion of approximately 50-50 among
the 25 participants. While debating on the academic programs the voice from
industry demanded that the graduates should be employable straightaway after
the degree program. This was not acceptable to us because no education can be a
substitute for industry-specific training. Employability cannot be defined as the ability
of the student to take up the professional job straight after graduation. What best the university can do is to make the
graduate adaptable to different types of job situations after a short term
training on the job. There used to be a complaint that engineering education is
too theoretical with little or no “practical” component. The present scenario
is that a majority of them have no theoretical background either. They are not
employable in their domain primarily because the four years in the university
did not add any value at all.
The Context
In India, nobody can be
blamed for setting the sole objective of education as employment. In spite of
lofty ideals set by educationists and institutions on academic excellence, the
fact remains that university students,
by and large crave a lucrative
employment on securing a degree. One of the reasons why education in Arts and
Science suffered a set-back, and pure learning is unheard of, is this race
among students for employment, motivated by their parents and society. Engineering colleges have mushroomed
near every bus stop, and the student population had an explosive growth
in recent times, whereas the population of good teachers did not grow at the
same rate. Colleges are compelled to make do as teachers, with those who are
rejected in the job market. Under the
circumstances, it is only natural that a good percentage of engineering
students are incapable of going through the rigorous academic program of
professional education. There is always
a pressure on the institution to reduce the academic standards to suit the
capability of the incoming students. This
inward spiral would ultimately result in producing large numbers of graduates
with hollow, or non-content degree.
On the positive side, industrial
growth of the country has been
impressive, particularly in the IT
sector, and employment is plenty. Today,
for most graduates, getting a job is not a problem, while getting the right job
is. Of late, employers have become more discerning and very choosy. Gone are
the days when a graduate earns a job just by his label. In spite of the
unemployment in the country, we find a large number of graduates who are unemployable.
It is in this context that this article on Employability in presented here.
Employability :
Employability is a
person’s capability of gaining initial employment, maintaining employment and
obtaining new employment.
A graduate cannot be
employed just because he has a degree in a specific area. There are three essential attributes the
person should have, namely, Knowledge,
Skills and abilities.
Traditionally, Universities and Colleges
concentrate on imparting knowledge, and believe that the student would acquire
the skills himself, and that the abilities are inborn qualities. In the modern
context, the Institution has to be proactive in imparting all the three
requirements to make a student employable.
However, the techniques adopted for imparting knowledge, skills and
abilities ought not to be the same. In
general it is thought that education brings about knowledge, vocational training, the skills and life skill training,
the abilities.
Knowledge :
Acquisition Strategies
Acquisition of knowledge has
at least five different levels as follows :
-
Familiarity with the topic
-
Memory and reproduction
-
Analysis
-
Synthesis
-
Creativity
Of the 40 theory courses and 16 practical courses
done in B.Tech. curriculum, one does not
expect the student to reach the level of
creativity in all of them. But the
tragedy of today is that, learning of all subjects is reduced to the level of
memorizing and reproducing it in the examination. Even in courses where the student should
reach the level of synthesis and creativity (like design subjects and project)
certain shortcuts are employed to
prevent the student from going anywhere above the level of memory and reproduction. In fact this is the
tragedy of our educational system in the
acquisition of knowledge. An
employer expects the student to have a domain knowledge. An electronics
engineer should know electronics. There should be a correlation between the
label and content.
There is a perception
among many employed people that the job requirement has nothing to do with what
they learnt in college, and therefore, college imparts useless knowledge. This is true in the case of many people who
enter the profession and do not grow in their technical domain. The rules of thumb they learn on the job
attain predominance over fundamental knowledge and they think that these rules
of thumb are enough, and should replace fundamental knowledge and education.
They try to eulogise their view by projecting their own theoretical ignorance
as “Practical experience”(Courtesy: Dr. KBM Nambudiripad). However, it is also
important to appreciate that bookish knowledge alone does not make a person employable.
Theoretical knowledge, complemented by
practical skills should form the “Domain Knowledge” of any professional
specialization. There are many who think
that Theoretical and Practical are opposites; they are not. The opposite of “Practical” is
not theoretical, but “Impractical”.
Acquisition of Skills
Skills can be classified
into two categories namely (a) skill for identification and solution of
problems (b) Technical skills to perform routine work efficiently. The first type of skill is of a higher
intellectual order whereas the second is close to the labour skill. Therefore, the first type of skill is closely
associated with acquisition of knowledge.
The second type depends on the
level of training.
Employers generally
complain that Universities and Colleges emphasize more on knowledge and less on
skills. The universities in turn argue
that they cannot reduce themselves to training schools for a specific
industry. Universities should produce
graduates who can adapt themselves to a variety of situations and cannot lose
generality in imparting of knowledge and skills. The industry, on the other hand should
provide adequate training to adapt the graduates to their specific situations, realizing
that university education is not a
substitute for on the job training.
On the part of the
Universities, the whole concept of “Practical Classes” should change. Today it has deteriorated to a level where
the student gains almost nothing from such classes.
Abilities
Today, institutions spend
a considerable amount of money and effort on preparing the students to face
interviews, thinking that this barrier is the most difficult one to get
across. Abilities have different
components, many are intrinsic and quite a few acquired.
Intrinsic Abilities include
learning ability, initiative, confidence, passion a sense of ownership, team
spirit, organizational skill, attitude, values and ethics. Acquired abilities include communication
skills, time management, stress management, critical thinking, group discussion
and etiquettes. These are not mutually exclusive sets and there is quite a lot
of overlap among them.
Conclusion
A major factor that one
often ignores is the change in attitude of the student community over the
years. When jobs were few and education scarce the competition was healthier
and most people wanted to do well. Large scale failures were unheard of, in
engineering colleges, primarily because only the cream of the student community
could aspire to reach an engineering college. Now there are more engineering
colleges than Arts colleges and polytechnics. A large percentage are those who
are there only for the label of a degree. This attitude is endorsed by many
parents too. There is a strong belief that getting a B.Tech degree “somehow”
will fetch a well paid job. Incompetence of teachers and greed of managements
are accelerating this downward slide. In today’s scenario it is foolhardy to
expect all graduates to be employable. My experience inside and outside the
classrooms puts the average employable percentage around thirty. If an
institution is able to get jobs for more than 30% of its graduates I would say
they are doing very well.
If the proportion of
employable graduates has to improve quite a lot of effort is needed at
different levels of School Education. By removing evaluation and examinations
at the end of every year, allowing every student to move to the higher class
and finally diluting the SSLC examination to ensure 100% pass, the initiative
of the less endowed children has been drained out. Such children are rendered
incapable of facing any academic challenge in higher education, using their
intelligence. When they reach professional colleges (which they surely do, due
to availability of seats) they expect to pass without ever working for it.
Finally the political pressure from students, parents and governments compel
institutions to dilute their programs and churn out worthless graduates with
labels and non-content qualifications. It needs tremendous political will to
stem the rot.
Post Script:
·
Knowledge without skill and ability is useless
·
Skill without knowledge and ability is stale
·
Ability without knowledge and skill is hollow
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