Sunday Posts

I feel the lightness of a crazy year that must be enjoyed once it has passed. This was my year of changing the course of my life myself. Like 2004, when I chose to become an immigrant, this was my year of living outside my comfort zone. Living like this has benefits: One discovers one's friends. Once the privileges of being endowed is stripped away, what's left is truly us: Whoever loves us at our barest are those who stays with us forever. It is worth living like this at times just to figure out who these people might be. So, a toast to those, who do not measure, who do not categorise, who do not seek reciprocity, but just remain human: The most pleasant thing to find is that this is not a rare type, but this is most people. Also, being on the fault line, some of the dearly held myths disappear. Such as, entrepreneurship is a magical thing: Once lived through the blood, sweat and tears, one gets the real deal, the disappointments, the mistakes and the like. Howev...

Vivek Wadhwa is pessimistic about the future of Indian IT because of its inability to change (See here ). He makes the point that the CEOs see that the ground realities are changing but are unwilling to do anything about it, with the daily imperative of closing Outsourcing orders dominating their agenda. In short, the sector has become a prisoner of its own success and there is a lack of strategic thinking. While I share Professor Wadhwa's sense of foreboding (that Indian IT industry isn't changing with time) and his prognosis (the lack of strategic culture), I would think that it is more of a case of an industry that can't change itself rather than industry leaders not wanting to change. Indeed, this makes things worse: Global IT services is an extremely competitive industry, and one thing that works for Indian companies here is the ability to scale, to line up thousands of workers which companies from other competitive countries can't easily do (with the excepti...

Arvind Kejriwal asks for ten days to solve the problems of Delhi!  He is a novice in politics: One never says when one will do something one does not intend to do. But what if he really wants to solve the problems? Problems such as corruption, VIPs cornering everything, police standing by as women are harassed, rising water and electricity charges while convenient arrangements ensure unlimited and free provisions for rich men's farmhouses.  But we have always been told that these problems can not be solved. We just have too many people. And, it is people who don't want to follow the rules. It is their fault: What can the government do? We have been told, for last sixty years and more, that it is best to have democracy for a day. You vote and you go home. You leave governance to those who can. You vote again in five years. We have got used to being governed: We are too messy, too incompetent, too poor - besides, we are just too many! The only way out is a ...

I was recently at a seminar where IBM's Global Head of University Partnerships were speaking. In an insightful talk, he outlined the profile of an ideal candidate that IBM wants to recruit: This is a person with T-Skills, one deep skill but a broad range of interests, he said. This is quite common among employers, hence worth exploring. However, whether or not an employer defines this in such precise terms as IBM, this is still worth looking at, because the break between education and employment may be seen as a T-skills conundrum. The desire for T-Skills can be somewhat obvious: Work in business organisations today are defined by an unquenchable thirst for greater efficiency and to infinite flexibility to ward off uncertainty. To achieve efficiency, they are increasingly specific, demanding in their job adverts an absolutely ready candidate who can add value right from day one. This is more true because most jobs are created today by start-ups and SMEs, which are under even ...

As the economies around the world starts to recover, our worst suspicion will be confirmed: This is likely to be a jobless recovery. Employers, living through austere times, have not just squeezed out every bit of efficiency they could by use of machinery and stretching their staff, but also are scarred psychologically: It would take a long time for them to expand their workforces imagining a rosy future again. Yet, the numbers at Education institutions are higher than ever before: As I write this post, the British universities are celebrating an ever higher intake, despite a three fold rise in tuition fees, while moaning, as usual, the loss of 'standards', indicating that people who wouldn't have previously gone to universities are now going there. This setting makes it 'the best of the times and the worst of the times' for Higher Education. Never before more people wanted it, and never before its value was so disputed and its practitioners so undermined. The...

The private colleges in the UK, and I am talking about the ones which are small, mostly run by owner-operators, and privately funded, have taken a terrible beating in the last couple of years. The British Government's across the board clamp down on student migration, the burden of which fell disproportionately on private colleges, made their business model disappear overnight. Some enterprising ones survived the onslaught by adapting quickly to the new student finance regime established in 2012, where the government made money follow the student and opened it up for private sector, even For-Profit, institutions.  This strategy has had some stunning successes, as the quick climb of numbers of students opting for private institutions, as opposed to a Public University, show. The success was primarily because the private colleges, leaner institutions without a mandate for public duty or unionised staff, could afford to charge the students lower fees compared to the universities....

The link between education and employment appear broken and educators usually get blamed for it. This is somewhat paradoxical: At a time when graduate salaries are holding up despite the global recession and more people than ever go to College, their work should be celebrated. The corollary fact that too many people also remain unemployed after getting a college education can equally be blamed on rapidly shifting job market, something outside the educators' direct control. The employers, sitting cozy in these debates, have some blame to shoulder too: Over time, they have become very specific about who they employ, and adapted the mantra of 'hire slowly, fire fast'. The national governments love heaping the blame of unemployment on the educators' door, with the political objective of deflecting the blame from themselves as well as to craft a justification for reducing the budgetary allocation for Higher Education. One would think that the educators usually do thems...

Post by Karnika Kahen . The Indian Politics has reached a fever pitch, the final stretch leading up to the General Election in May 2014, an election, I believe and hope, that will mark a point of departure in India's history, perhaps the most significant since its Independence in 1947. The outcome of this election is far from certain, but whatever the outcome is, a break from the past is clearly foretold. And, while many things can go wrong, Indians like me must remain optimistic and keep their faith in the resilience of the Indian electorate.  It does seem that the Indian politics have finally reached the twilight zone of Gandhi family politics. The regal show that dominated Indian political agenda throughout its post-independence period, first by leadership and then by reflected glory, appears to be a spent force, out of step with the young, ambitious country. The traditional mechanisation of vote bank politics, populism and wilful policy ambivalence that marked I...

The current model of Higher Education is inherently local.  Indeed, the credentialing system, the degrees, are conferred under authority from national or regional authorities, and are primarily set in context of the local schooling system. The sensibilities are rooted in the local connections, interests and priorities of the faculty.  The growth of Global Higher Education, both of mobile students and virtual instruction, is a narrative of exporting one country's, or region's, knowledge, values and ideas to another. This indeed is problematic if the nature of work for the learner is local. This is the cautionary tale of the Foreign Educated who works in the inside economies of the countries, FMCG, Retail, Insurance, Logistics, Banking sectors etc., but are dismissive or contemptuous of the norms and practices and live in a futile pursuit of doing things in a 'better' way. But it is equally problematic for those whose work is global, in the trades and practices ...

Times Higher Education reports that the Student Loan Access for 23 Private Colleges have been suspended (See story ). This means that these private colleges will not be able to recruit any more students for the current academic year. Presumably, they would be able to recruit again for the 2014-15 Academic Year, when their numbers will be capped (they have been uncapped so far). Indeed, this should not amount to much as the main recruiting season, Autumn 2013, is already over, and some of these private colleges have recruited more students than they can possibly service. However, this tale of expansion leading to knee jerk reaction from the Government is yet another illustration how little the Policy Makers understand the Private Providers in Education. To be clear, private providers have not over-recruited. This is because there was never a limit set on how many students they can actually recruit, and hence the Government's decision, prompted by 'expansion', may appea...