Got my Degree, where’s my job???

The New York Times talks about getting your degree and still being umemployed and highlights the fact that most unemployed college graduates in India lack three essential skills,

• Bad English/Poor accent(Poor communication skills)
• Rote learning
• A general lack of soft skills( group interaction,body language etc)

While the overall message of the article is well conveyed, the author states that the development of the desired skills are only to be achieved by those attending IIM’s and IIT’s. (Quoted below)

But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.

Similar articles always seem to brand Indian educational institues into two categories. The IIT/IIM lot and the others( and usually ‘others’ stand for everything bad about the indian education system). I disagree on that aspect of the article, just because you went to IIT does not mean that your accent is impeccable and you are pitching creatives in madison ave to the fortune 500. I know a lot of folks who went to IIT and were brilliant analytically but had trouble with basic grammar. A lot of these articles tend to see the colleges as black and white and seem to miss the grey. The grey are those colleges where they accomplish 60%-80% of developing an employable graduate. For ex: A lot of colleges in the major metros fall in this category. The students speak great english have semi decent analytical skills and seem to do just fine finding jobs.

I do have to agree with Anand(the author of the article) on the fact that colleges in India do need to place emphasis on the soft skills. Academic capabilities carry far more importance and students generally seem to lack the back-slapping,personable natures usually needed to get ahead in the corporate world. Somebody needs to fill this gap. Aptech/NIIT are passe now, Language/personality schools are in. There is a huge market opportunity for somebody to step in and start offering courses with emphasis on the  communication and creative sciences.

India Inc new graduates – Quantity over Quality?

There is a thought-provoking article(requires registration) today on the New york times written by Somini Sengupta. It looks at the current skills gap being experienced by technology companies in India and and the quality of engineering grads being produced by Indian colleges. The facts are eye-opening: While India produces more than 400,000 engineers a year, only 1 in 4 is considered hire worth by these companies. Obviously the other three graduates are not making the cut which leads up to the skills shortage.

Somini addresses some key issues in the article

• Hiring is showing no pace of slowing down. Technology companies expect to double their hiring in the next four years. ICICI is planning to add 40,000 workers in the next three years.
• Companies are expanding their Campus recruitment colleges and are now spanning beyond first and second tier schools.
• Technology firms are placing more emphasis on soft skills rather than just looking at a candidate’s technical skills.
• Special institutes are now cropping up to help candidates improve their communication and creative thinking abilities
• India is considering allowing private equity investment in the higher education sector.

I think this article needs to be a wake up call not only to the education ministry but also to colleges churning out these graduates. While hiring professors with a Phd may not be possible overnight, colleges can take simple steps towards improving their candidate’s marketability. Some of them may be starting in-house courses on business english and encouraging group discussions. Indian colleges should also learn from their american counterparts in the sense that they need to encourage students to participate actively in the open source movement.Maybe even adopt a few open source project’s themselves.

At CampusChai, our vision is to reduce this gap. We will be able to provide colleges a platform to showcase their abilities and track important metrics in campus recruitment. A lot the graduates are half finished products because colleges do not have a platform to collect aggregated placement data and use that info. We believe that colleges that use CampusChai will have access to this data and better equip their students to meet industry demands. Somini’s article ends on a sad note for Mr. Rangaswamy, the founder of a college. The reason being that TCS decides not to recruit at his college. With CampusChai at his side, Mr. Rangaswamy might just finish his next NYT appearance on a happy note

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