Sunday Posts

I have recently been involved in developing and testing a student 'employability' programme. Like any other journey, this one evolved as we progressed. Because we took a design approach to building this, goalposts have shifted several times. We started building this with a very specific institutional context in mind and then looked to generalise it, making it available for other institutions in dramatically different contexts. The whole exercise has been one of exploration, conversations and iterations, just as we expected this to be. We engaged with a range of people, inside the institutions as well as outside, including a lot of business leaders, recruiters and learning professionals. And, of course, with a number of students, who joined the courses we delivered. We faced the usual challenges - of fitting things around the calendar, resourcing and compliance roadblocks, the usual bureaucratic powerplays etc. - and those highlighted, as expected, the issues of institutional cu...

A large part of my work now is designing an educational programme that can sit alongside university curricula aimed at student 'employability'. We started this very predictably - with a mandate to ensure early preparation for the job market and industry connections - but as we assimilate various ideas and learn from experience, we know that we can't stick to the business as usual.  By business-as-usual, I mean the mechanistic employability programmes that are now so popular. A degree does not ensure jobs any more. Besides, the governments across the world are paying more attention to student loan books than they previously did and holding universities responsible for employment outcomes. Hence, it's common to see training programmes that prepare students for job search, CV writing and interviews.  There are clear limitations to what such training can do. These make two assumptions which are not necessarily correct: First, it assumes that the job the students will have e...

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...

It's time for educators to acknowledge what even a first-time recruiter knows - that Purple Squirrels do not exist. Employability has become a buzzword in education for several reasons. Governments want to measure and employability - both how many students are getting jobs and at what starting salary - is a neat metric to present to the taxpayers. Private investors in education know that employability - private benefits from education - is the raison d'etre for private education to exist. Whether the faculty, or for that matter, the students, at least most of them until the final weeks of their final year, care about employability is a matter up for debate, but this is definitely the big topic in the Education Conference circuits. But, sadly, purple squirrels are not real. Employability is an empty goal. Part of the reason for this is the same as we can't always find the right people for the right job. That gap is both spatial and temporal: As we would s...

We needed an ugly word like 'employability' because we have a crisis: Despite all the promises and all the efforts, an unacceptably small percentage of people that we educate in our schools and colleges find the employment they expect, aspire for and deserve. Never mind the statistics here. I am weary of it though there are plenty of 'studies' that will confirm the observation above. But the trouble with these studies is they are often motivated, and make big claims based on small efforts. It is easy to make headlines such as 'Only a quarter of engineering graduates in India are employable' but dig deeper and you will see that the basis of that is some executive's offhand remark, which ascribes all the blame to the graduates and their educators but says little about what employability meant in context. Ask the educators and often they don't see what the fuss is about. It's a bit dated, but there was one McKinsey study, perhaps very ...

In the UK, the conversation about Graduate Employability remains, well, a conversation. Student loans are not yet biting, and graduate unemployment is still relatively low, when compared against its European peers. Underemployment and lack of job progression may be a bigger issue, but till the student loans become oppressive (they are income contingent at this time), they are unlikely to cause a crisis. But this is one thing to watch out for, as the student loan becomes more of an issue, the Government starts allowing differential fees for universities and starts selling student loan books at massive discounts.  The government has published the Green Paper on Higher Ed, which has many ideas including the differential fees, but not many on Employability. Johnny Rich picked it up in his review in Times Higher Education and proposes that this should become an intrinsic part of Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). His view of Employability, very aptly, revolves around three thin...

I get asked a lot - what is the value of a foreign degree? The correct answer is - it depends. It depends on where you study, what you study and where you are from. We know the first part already - where you study matters. This is both in terms of the country where you went to school, and the school you went to. The school matters more than the country, but if the school is obscure, the country counts. The effects of other two parameters - what you study and where you come from - are seldom talked about. The discipline matters a lot. Parthenon, a consultancy (now part of EY), studied the effect of foreign qualification on job prospects of a candidate and pay. They concluded that while employers prefer a candidate with foreign qualification over others, it has no discernible impact on pay, except in some disciplines. They pointed out Hospitality and Digital Media as two of the areas where foreign education impacts pay, and perhaps it is easy to guess why that would be so. ...

Whether being Global is desirable depends on which side of the fence you are at. But there could be a different approach. The word Global has specific meaning in its current usage. It is no longer the descriptive word that it was meant to be, with all the idealism of universal brotherhood. Since the 90s, when money became global, it has one very intrusive meaning for the recipients of globalization, those who turned their world upside down. Becoming Global, in that sense, means being an agent of this change, with a negative connotation for those from Global South. In this specific usage, the requirements are quite well defined. English is the language of this type of globalisation - indeed, more specifically, American English - and speaking the language of investment and prioritising on money-making is a must. Another rich country language is good - how about German - as is wide familiarity of power circles. The iconography of globalisation also includes a certain look, a cer...

In my conversations about Skills Training and Employability, I have started using the SIM model. This is indeed based on my various conversations over the last five years with employers and educators, and attempts to understand why the Employment-to-Education gap persists. And, indeed, SIM is the shorthand for the three dimensions of this gap, Skills, Information and Mobility, which I wrote about earlier. ( See here ) Instead of seeing Education-to-Employment gap as a massive cognitive failure for the Educators, or an original sin emerging out of narrow self-serving attitudes of the employers, this model allows me to see why such a gap may exist. Indeed, over time, I have come to feel that I should be speaking about the problem in plural, or problems, because these three dimensions are really three distinct challenges to be overcome. And, anyone focusing on any one aspect of it is likely to be frustrated by the outcomes. Consider the frequent complaints from the Skills Traini...

As Education-to-Employment gap becomes worse, the popularity of 'Employability' training grows. This is a worldwide phenomenon: The government usually pays, and many micro businesses are set up every year in the hope that the students will also pay for it themselves. The format is usually cheap and cheerful: Bring in the learner for a few days, tell them how to write CVs, present themselves in the interviews, how to dress, how to shake hands and how to look confident.  Since those people I know in this trade are not stupid, I would think that they are driven either by incredible optimism or sheer opportunism. How else can one believe that if someone was not employable before their kind intervention, they become one just by learning to do better handshakes? There is no denying that learning to write CVs, or doing better at interviews, are important skills; but these things can only work if the students know in the first place what they want to do, and have the right skills...

One of the colleagues asked during the Education Investment Conclave, which took place last week, what it means in practise. The question was directed to me, and my answer something to the effect that it means preparing the students so that they can be employable all their lives, not just get the first job. What I was thinking is that what goes on in the name of employability is so very lame, the writing of CV or preparing for interviews, all directed to somehow crossing the initial barrier into work, based on the implicit assumption that getting started is the most difficult thing. There may be some truth about the difficulty of getting started, but that's only half the story, if that. Employability isn't about just crossing the threshold into employment; in fact, in most cases, the employability problems start thereafter. The candidates don't get why it is so important to turn up for work at time, why you can't afford to lose temper, why you have to work in a...

A debate we are having in the company at this time is how to market our courses in the UK, and at the core of it is the course we developed aimed at aspiring undergraduates abroad, titled Global Employability Programme.  With our initial market research and interactions, we see immediate traction for this course in countries like India and China. This isn't, indeed, a standard employability product: One that advises candidates to be on time for interview and be properly dressed, and help make cosmetic changes to their CVs. There is no stereotyping, as would usually happen with a battery of psychometric tests. It is, in line with our operating mantra, a new generation course, where the learner, a 'talent', must imagine himself/herself as a business. Indeed, the key shift in this view is that the candidate is not a 'product', something which inertly presents itself to buyers, but the 'maker', an enterprise, which juggle with his/her multiple abilities as ...