Sunday Posts

My current work involves the development of an employability programme. As I worked on it, I had a deja vú, an old idea really, which is worth posting about. Years ago, I discovered the obvious: That it's not easy to educate for employability. Not only education has a broader goal, which is often undermined when one narrowly focuses on the requirements of one industry or another, labour markets, particularly in the sectors which are technology-driven and globally connected, are notoriously fickle. Hence, I concluded then, that career planning for students is a pointless enterprise and instead, we should develop a design approach to career (see Career Design, not Career Planning and How to do Career Design ).  Indeed, since then and through different projects I participated into and many coversations I have had with people working in the field, my convictions have only deepened. In general, I think, we are accepting that all knowledge is provisional and our ability to predict the f...

There is something deeply dysfunctional about living in an age of ideas when all ideas look the same.  To understand this, one needs to stand outside the bubble that we all live in. Yes, it does seem that there are a lot of new things happening around us - the wonder-device of a smart-phone transforming our world by hailing taxis and ordering take-aways - and yet, everything seems to be an app, every politician seems to be the same, the media is either starkly left or starkly right, all companies seem to live in a make-believe world of valuation - and very little of what matters seem to change around us. I have been navigating this world for a long time with a deep confusion. The trouble really is that the technologists usually talk things up. The approach of science - that one arrives at a conclusion through falsification, by trying to prove why it is not the case - is not the approach of the modern technologists. Rather, superlatives abound and claims precede capabiliti...

The big question for many college graduates is whether to work for a start-up or, wait and look for opportunities with more stable companies. In my straw poll, the opinions are split right in the middle.  About half the people think start-ups are cool and fun, and therefore, better to work for. The more practically minded make the point that they offer a range of opportunities, to grow and to learn, which an established corporation wouldn't allow.  The other half feels that working for start-ups are the worst of both the worlds. They offer no security - the point of a job - and rarely big rewards, as most of it is usually reserved for the Founders. Most start-ups also fail. There is little transparency with regard to the finances and working practices of a start-up, and therefore, very little to make a well-informed decision. And, finally, while the learning value is undeniable, the value of that learning is questionable. Even the start-ups themselves often pay a...

I am sure 'career indulgences' appears an oxymoron, there can't be such a thing! But in my quest to do things I love, and also to work with people I like, I have created, at least, the possibility. At this time, a penny-dropping moment of sorts, I am reflecting when I started indulging in dreams! And, indeed, there are many forkways to look back at, like these: 1. Walking out a secure job and an impending promotion, I jumped on the dotcom boat in 1998: Not many people around me were doing that at the time and I had no idea how to deal with investors and their contracts.  2. A couple of years later, when the enterprise became boring and investors became bosses, I pursued my dreams of adventure - going to a country in the middle of political turmoil and business decline - and lived through bomb threats, general strikes and all that.  3. When all that was sorted out and I had won, four years later, I gave up yet another promotion and promises of a predict...

Of the books I read recently, Herminia Ibarra's Working Identity made a lasting impression. Despite my deep aversion to the simplistic and formulaic style of business books, and this book is no different, it resonated for two reasons. Professionally, I am exploring solutions to the difficulty of education-to-employment transition, and my experience at the fault-line tells me that this arises, in the first place, because of the divergence of realities of commercial work and that of the college; the students arrive at work without resolving who they are and what they would like to, and struggle to fit in increasingly unforgiving workplaces pursuing the illusive idea of perfect candidates. Further, personally it has been appropriate too, as I am at the very point of questioning whether it is worth living my life the way I am doing now. I may already be in my second career - moving from one country to another and transitioning into Higher Education I have already done - but I do not...

When I ran out of money in 2014, I decided to take a two year break, to revisit my ideas and see if I still feel them after a while. Sure enough, some ideas died down as their immediate context changed. But others persisted, and as life comes a full circle and I think about what I must do, one particular idea that I flirted with not just during U-Aspire days, but even before, when I was working to rejig a London college. This is to set up an Enterprise School. An Enterprise School - and I may have to find a better term for it eventually - is not a school to make entrepreneurs, much less for handing out degrees or diplomas of entrepreneurship. One of the people I consider my mentor says that entrepreneurs do not go to school, and indeed, going to school to get a degree is somewhat anti-entrepreneurial. That entrepreneurship, at its core, is about a bias for action, can not be denied: It is about knowing, assessing and managing risks through action and commitment, rather than getti...

In a lot of ways, 2015 was a year of waiting for me. Two years of bootstrapping to get the business off the ground took a heavy toll on my finances and me, and towards the end of 2014, I resolved to step back and go back to employment, which I did. The last several months was just that, of keeping my head down, and of reflecting on the experiences. It was time to come to terms with failure and re-imagining. This was what 2015 was about, and I feel I have been successful at doing this. However, with 2016 around the corner, it is time to put a plan in place. Indeed, one of the key lessons that I have learned through the start-up and bust is the limits of romanticism about start-up life. One of the key mistakes I committed in U-Aspire was to ask and raise too little money, and spending inordinately long time in raising that money. I should say I should have known this all along, but the truth is, I did know and I still took the risk, rather foolishly, as it turns out at the hindsigh...

I have been working in International Education for the last fifteen years. This has been an interesting journey as I have done various roles, right from teaching classes to establishing operations in different countries, selling courses as well as managing university partnerships. And, indeed, I was writing about this as I went along, using this blog as a scratchpad of ideas and records of interactions with people from different backgrounds and interests. I am not sure I thought of this as a career path in any sort of meaningful way, but it somewhat became one. Some of the things I did was deliberate, others less so. In fact, if anything, I discovered that a career in International Education is quite different from what I perceived it to be. Or, that there is no career in International Education if one remained Indian, by appearance and at heart. International Education, in more ways than one, is about promoting courses from Developed countries in the Developing, and this require...

Again, a Sunday and a Sunday post.  After taking on this travelling life, Sundays are travel days for me. Sundays often mean a late morning flight out of Gatwick, with the goal to reach somewhere by Monday morning. Often, my mind is closed on Sunday morning, in anticipation of the sleepless night that would follow. And, indeed, there are other Sundays to play the same chore in reverse, to get into Gatwick early morning and then spending rest of the day catching up on all the sleep missed during the two week sojourns and indeed, the red-eye! This is one rare Sunday without any of that, and that makes me so protective of it. This is my time to think and read, I would like to believe, though the usual life soon catches on - it usually reaches its full crescendo around mid-Morning, usually with the clarion call of Milk (or something else, most inevitably) running out. So, I stop my indulgent reverie and return to Planet Earth, usually manifested as a Shop Aisle, at around 10a...

I wrote previously about the futility of Career Planning and recommended Career Design instead. ( See here ) The modern workplaces are fast changing. McKinsey points to four Global Trends, each powerful on its own right, which are reshaping the work and the workplaces. These trends are Urbanisation, Technology (Automation, Micro-manufacturing), Demographics (Aging workforce, Young workforce) and indeed Globalisation. As all of these forces reach a tipping point, and therefore, industries are disrupted and new industries and players emerge, the hands-off rational approach of planning a career looks terribly out of date. There are no other ways of appreciating the forces at work other than experiencing them first hand. There is no rational way of coping with such change, since we do not know what the changes could be, but creating a practical, practise orientation, one of adaptability and infinite adjustments. And, in context, what one likes or dislikes, what trade-offs one would make,...

Please, give up Career Planning.  This whole idea of planning, setting goals, defining activities and timelines, moving towards it step by step, is so dated. It used to be useful when one knew where to go. All those advices about beginning with the end in mind, fine on paper, but do not work any more when things change so much, so fast. The talk of Career Planning, however well-meaning, is always misdirected, and possibly harmful. Indeed, one can plan near term - for that next job, or to get a skill - but this assumption that you can plan your next twenty years, a whole career, is itself based on the flawed assumption that one can predict the world well in advance. This is the mistake most well-intentioned parents make when they push their children down the career paths they themselves took, or in some cases, those they wished they had taken. Such reliance on planning closes down the opportunities of exploration, of chance opportunities, of continuous learning, and often ...

If you are coming out of college, how do you start thinking about your career? Or, if you came out of college a few years ago, and have dawdled through various things you don't like, how do you re-think about your career all over again? Indeed there could be numerous variations of this scenario, each person having an individual one, and the key question to ask is whether there are any general rules to think about careers at all. And, if you want to get really deep, you may start musing what's a career anyway. Let's start with the philosophical one. My favourite story about this is the story of the young man who was fishing in a pond middle of the day when he got accosted by a busy type, may be some distant uncle. Horrified with this young man's laziness, the older man advised him to abandon leisurely pursuits and get some productive engagement - education, employment or training whatever. The younger man asked him what would happen if he did that: The older man to...

Over the last three years, I have had several conversations explaining why I chose to study Education, and particularly Adult Learning. It struck some people as odd that when I thought of gaining professional credential, I chose to do a Masters in Education, rather than an MBA or study online learning technologies; and, that I chose to focus on Adult Learning as a discipline, and not study Compulsory Education, which is indeed the more popular thing to do for an Education graduate.  It was a common sense decision for me, as I wanted to pivot my career into Adult Learning: All the things I did in the last few years, taught Postgraduate courses, wrote curriculum, designed online environments, explored international partnerships, wrote and conducted assessments, explore education policy, and built an education start-up, all those activities centred around this one clear decision to build a career in adult learning. So, the decision to study the discipline formally was a no-brain...

Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp for $19 Billion has set off an unlikely debate: With 55 employees of WhatsApp getting very rich, the jobs versus growth debate has been rekindled again. Just like the Instagram deal, where the company was sold for $1 billion but had just 13 employees (in comparison with industrial era Kodak, which employed upwards of 250,000 at its peak), this is another reminder that we are into a different economy where output and jobs are completely de-linked. And, it is not just about a few people getting a lot more and a lot of people getting a lot less, it is about some people in some professions getting everything.  This creates a completely different set of problems than we faced before. It is not just about social unrest that may follow, and even the lack of demand that many Western economies are struggling with and Bob Reich is warning against (see his take on the WhatsApp deal ), but even more fundamentally, it is about disappearance of hope for most...

In my previous work on Education for Employment (links below), I pleaded the case to shift focus on to the goals and aspirations of the students, most of whom come to education with at least an implicit objective of getting into employment. My argument was primarily that Universities are designed, at least in a large way, to serve themselves, and all too often, the academia's focus is out of sync with that of the students. As a solution, I was arguing about a new paradigm for engagement with employers, keeping the student as the core focus rather than academic ambitions or the immediate needs of a particular employer.  The arguments from among academic colleagues rightly challenged the plausibility of such a shift, pointing that most businesses are driven by here-and-now requirements, while the academia may essentially need to take long run view for the sake of its students. There is indeed some merit in this argument, as the failed attempts to create a successful vocational ...

When I started on my project on building a global university, a friend advised me not to involve India. Because, he said, India is chaotic, its Higher Education system completely corrupted by get-rich-quick schemes and mercenary institutions. This was, in a way, a known fact: The Economist called India Education's Wild West and it was an apt description. However, for the very reason of being the wild west, it was attractive: It is not just the wild west, it is also the biggest opportunity in education that exists today. It is a combination of large number of aspiring young people, a broken Higher Education system and employers constrained by lack of employable manpower: Something that an education company usually dream to solve. However, there was wisdom in my friend's advice: His point was not about the lack of opportunity, but the possibility that no matter how well-intentioned the project was, it is easy to get crowded out in India. Because no one seems to be doing a go...