Sunday Posts

Education does not readily translate into employment, hence there is a E2E gap, says McKinsey. It is a double whammy - we face an unemployment problem as well as a labour force problem - and causes all kinds of difficulties. On one hand, growing populations of young people, unable to find gainful employment, become disaffected. On the other, companies can not achieve optimum levels of production or service, and often operate sub par. This is a big problem, getting bigger, and this has resulted in some earnest discussion about all the elements of the E2E chain, flexible labour force strategies, more employment orientated education etc.  While the Skills gap - education is not creating enough skilled workers - gets the maximum exposure, it is only a partial reason for the E2E gap. The reasons why E2E gap exists can be classified in three parts - Skills, Information and Mobility (how is SIM for an acronym?).  Skills is a big problem, and educators endlessly debate why t...

I have been touring India for last three weeks promoting an education aimed at bridging the education-to-employment gap. This is a persistent problem that we notice in the West: That universities are all designed to serve themselves, promoting abilities and attitudes in their best students which serve their own ends, best students do best becoming an university professor. The businesses, whose requirements are different, often have to retrain the people they require, and it is very difficult for them to make their voice heard in the curriculum and teaching in the university. One of the solutions to this problem, therefore, is project-based learning, where the employers and educators are brought together in a common endeavour, where practical work counts as much towards the degree as academic excellence.  At the outset, India has this problem of the severest kind. Every employer seems to complain that they are not able to find people they need. The education institutions are o...

Vocational Education is the new-found panacea for development problems, we are often told, as one ambitious programme after another are rolled out by High Profile politicians. I have earnestly followed the fortunes of many of these programmes, often looking from inside as well as outside, here in Britain, in India, in Malaysia, and in Africa. I have written about these experiences on this blog, mainly noting that these programmes usually represent a colossal waste of public money, offer poor education and fail to build up confidence and professional expertise among the learners. While there may be successful experiments, society-wide as in Germany or in individual cases (I have also written about the historical Bailey Schools in China, which kept the economy alive during the Sino-Japanese war), these lessons are usually ignored in the now-prevalent model of mass scale vocational education, funded by the state, delivered to the unemployed by 'providers', usually commercial org...

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...