Sunday Posts

I have come back where I started. I decided to write this blog in a diary mode yet again. This is how I started anyway, but abandoned the banter as I got more people reading the blog. But I just feel too constrained to fit myself into a crusty professional self - this has been the bane of my career, I would suspect - and I found out that churning out wisdom on the blog is not my kind of thing. I tried and stopped, stopped and tried, and like now, and I am at another moment of fresh start. A part of how I approach this blog is about my professional responsibility as well. When I am in employment, rather than being my own boss (I alternated between the two modes several times), these constraints matter more. I never wanted to write what I had for breakfast on this blog (I am not famous yet) but about ideas and situations that stimulate and make me think. And, some of these are disappointments: In fact, I figured out, disappointments stimulate more than a happy night out. Or, for th...

Over last several years, I have worked to find that Holy Grail of Education: A degree that leads directly to a Job! I did write about this search on this blog, all the dead ends, disappointments and revealations that came along the way. Starting with perfect innocence - that this is the best thing that can happen to corporations whose difficulty in finding skilled personnel - I came to learn the ground realities of the trade, that the skills gap is usually 'someone else's problem' and long-term solutions are no good for the managers focused on quarterly targets.  Despite this, however, I got somewhere. Almost implausibly (to me, at least), I got some advance commitments on hiring graduates we could train. It was a commitment with all the expected checks and balances, but that provided that keystone for building a demand-led degree. And, indeed, the first one is always the hardest: Once that one commitment was signed off, it was easier to have conversations with ot...