Sunday Posts

The conversation in India today is centred on exporting workers. The Indian government is funding Skills Development centres across the country with a mandate for training young people so that they can find jobs abroad. Partly, this is a reaction to India's job crisis - only about 150,000 net new jobs are being created in the organised sector against 25 million people entering the working age every year - but this is also based on the policy thinking that India would be 'manpower exporter' of the world in the coming years.  The wisdom of aiming to 'export' manpower is surely questionable.  First, this also reflects an inadequate understanding of the scale of the challenge in India. In India, 70,000 people turn 25 every day on average, or about 2.1 million people every month. The total number of Indians living abroad at this point of time is 15 million. Whatever capacity of skill development for overseas employment could be created by the government, i...

There is a talent problem in our economies. Speak to any employer in almost any country, and they will tell you how hard it is to find good employees with appropriate skills. And, this happens despite a massive expansion of public education system and rising literacy, an unprecedented level of access to Higher Education and Skills Training. There is also a near total consensus that education has an economic goal - jobs or career - and most employers have existing programmes and expansive plans to engage with education providers at all levels in search of talent. And, yet, the problem persists - and getting worse. Here, I think, we should make the case for a paradigm shift. The recruitment of talent currently happens with a supply chain paradigm. Even in the best of the cases, where employers are deeply engaged with education institutions, they try to shape the curriculum, spot student talent early and do campus interviewing, they are still looking at the educators as passive supp...

In my work at the fault line between Education and Employment, it seems obvious that we have this problem in the first place because of the closed frameworks we have built. In Education, the accreditation has become an end in itself, and educators try to solve all the problems with a course, a big hammer no matter how tiny is the nail. Employers, on their part, are focused on identifying and attracting employees who have specific skills as required, another closed framework with a tiny opening.  At one level, everyone seems to be happy with the situation as it is. Educators are intent on building a complete person who does not need a job, and employers are happy with that perfect employee whose education does not matter. At another level, this is a big social problem, as politicians sell their middle class economics on the basis of education-to-employment transition. They usher in globalisation at will and hail technological progress, and promise the magic of education to mak...

McKinsey Global Institute is predicting Online Talent Platforms ( see here ) could have significant overall benefits, adding $2.75 trillion to global economy by 2025. For this, they define talent platform in a rather open-ended way, combining the traditional recruitment websites like Monster, the social platforms such as Linkedin and the Gig economy enablers such as Uber or Handy together. The central thesis could be read as thus - a fundamental restructuring of the labour markets is under way, and these online platforms could remedy some of the effects of that change. The scary figure of 850 million unemployed in the major economies, some of which induced by technological change and labour market shifts, jumps out of the report, and its optimistic vision that technological tools would solve technology induced challenges. In many ways, this affirms my thinking about the Skills-Information-Mobility model (See SIM Model of Employability ). The broad definition of the Online Talent Pla...

In an interesting TED talk (see below), Rainer Strack underscores the urgency of thinking about global workforce crisis. The numbers, as projected in the work of BCG (to which he was a contributor), are indeed telling: The workforce crisis may cost $10 trillion worth of GDP between 2020 and 2030 ( see the BCG work here ). This is not any doomsday talk urging people into action, because the facts are in plain sight anyway: The population in developed nations are aging and there are not enough new births to take the place of retirees. The solutions are common sense but politically impossible: Import workers from countries which may have surplus labour or worse working conditions. Indeed, Messers Strack and others see the limitations in this formula and suggest a mix of measures, not just geographical migration but also non-geographical ones (such as offshoring) and bringing more women and retirees into workforce (Child labour is indeed a taboo subject). This conversation is im...

I am contradicting myself. I sat through a business meeting only a few days back and proclaimed that instead of trying to fit people into roles, we should look at roles first and then find people, recruit from outside if necessary. That made perfect sense, and sounded nice. Everyone around the table agreed – as if this is quite obvious – and I felt good because I sounded business-like. However, reflecting on this over the next few days, the statement does not appear as obvious as it did initially. The first problem is that the roles don’t exist but people do. However much we talk about competencies and job descriptions, that’s nothing other than a perception – a bunch of assumptions made by people other than the person doing the job about what doing the job means. Okay, I know about those soft scientific techniques of asking people around what their job needs, and creating the competency maps, but, indeed, people say what they think the job needs but not what they do. The problem with ...

I have just incorporated a company with Talent Management in its name, and almost immediately, Barclays announced a huge bonus for its 'talent' amid a huge public uproar. What's worse, talent's poster boys, footballers in English Premier League, are kind of having a nasty time. You sure love John Terry as a footballer, though he looks older than his 29 years, but when you look at his conduct - sleeping with his best mate's girlfriend behind his back and chasing any busty girl around him despite being safely married to his childhood sweetheart, you wouldn't want to be him. Even worse is Ashley Cole, who is married to splendid Cheryl, who seems to be one of the best known WAGs in England anyway, who would cheat, lie, cheat, get caught and will almost surely cheat and lie yet again. I am all too aware of the usual argument. Don't try to meet the author whose novels you love! Because people are different in their private lives. They ought to be, it is their pr...

I am at it again, after a gap of almost five years, when I am actively searching for a job. This means all the things that come in the package, preparing a CV, posting it on job sites, keeping a watch on job alerts, firing off applications to those positions which remotely match my area of expertise and smarting off after reading through various rejection mails every morning. Despite the disappointments, it is an interesting exercise to do, to get a feel what I am really good at, to study the patterns of rejection letters and infer which one was written with some sympathy and which one was auto-generated, feeling the sense of hope and despair while waiting for some employers who did not say no, overall feeling young again. Also, the interesting thing here is that my heart is not in it, not yet. I am not sure whether I can get back the zeal of sending out 750 applications as I did in the first few weeks after landing in Britain, which earned me 743 straight rejections, 7 interviews and ...