Sunday Posts

This is a question I asked my Trainer friends often, without ever receiving a satisfactory answer: Why isn't there a course on understanding failures? Business failures are more common than business successes. Failures teach more - 'double loop learning' is what the learning theorists would say - and understanding what not to do is indeed the bedrock of a sound strategy. Yet, while various trainers sweat out in the endless quest of differentiating themselves, they all offer different formula of success - this method or that, always fool-proof, always the only route to success - no one wants to talk about failure. Why? Apart from the explanation that talking about failure would be bad omen, there are hardly any good explanations for this rather inexplicable omission. That Business Executives don't want to talk about failure is wrong: Read any business book, and the narrative is often structured as a struggle, that things got worse before it got better! It i...

The idea came to me from various conversations in China and India: That teacher training in Higher Education is an urgent need and a significant opportunity. This is counter-intuitive. Most Western institutions of Higher Education, autonomous as they are, train their own teachers. For Continuing Professional Development, the emphasis here is on Research, and an established network of Conferences exist to foster the community. Teacher training is for schools, where the volume and turnover of teachers are high, and it needs constant refreshing. However, the expansion of Higher Education in the last decade in China, India and elsewhere brings into play a different reality altogether.  First, the Higher Education institutions created in these countries in the last decade are different from research-led institutions in the West: They are teaching institutions operating at a mass scale. The focus is on teaching at scale, and the appropriate teacher training is therefore of ...

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...

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...

The once world class Indian Training industry is in quite a sad state right now. Battered by the rise of private Higher Education since 2004, when degrees became a commodity and everyone flocked out to buy one, it eventually destroyed itself by selling its soul to skilling. Once the government, driven by the political agenda to be seen to be doing something, announced millions of dollars of bonanza, they all fell for it. That this was not a bonanza, except for those few large companies which would eventually make this money disappear, and a system of consultants and officials who would create an institutionalised 'speed money' system to earn 10% to 40% on every transaction, that did not matter much. The skilling initiatives in India had nothing to do with the poor, nothing to do with skills and nothing to do with training, except that it provided some sort of superannuation for those who were left in the industry and did not bail out early enough for the other ...

It was a standard ministerial speech, but what Matthew Hancock, UK's Minister of Skills, said yesterday should be noted. Not that the ideas are anything new, educators like Ken Robinson has been talking about them for years, but this amounts to a Ministerial acknowledgement of some sort: That skills education needs to change fundamentally. ( See the transcript of the speech here ) The key idea that makes this speech notable is an acknowledgement that the education divide must end. Mr Hancock's point is to eliminate the divide between academic and vocational education, and the labelling that comes with it. As the credo of skills education spreads beyond Europe, this is an important message. One must acknowledge that this is a common refrain among Skills educators: They almost always complain being treated as 'Second Class Educators' by their Higher Ed colleagues. Mr Hancock, being the Minister of the department, may have only been giving voice to it. I am not claim...

Vocational Training is supposed to be a big thing. This is heralded as the answer to the problems of productivity, particularly in countries in Asia and Africa with rapidly growing population. The idea is simple: Get the poor people in a classroom for a few months and make them learn something useful and then get them to work in a factory or profession. Once it is done on large scale - India says it wants to train 500 million people in next 10 years or so - the whole economy can change. The trouble is that it does not work. I have articulated my complaints about the Indian vocational training system earlier, and hence I shall not repeat it here. I usually receive a stock answer when I talk about the short-comings of vocational training as it is done in India, that it is all down to poor execution. So, when outdated skills are taught, students do not engage or the trained students do not find a job, it bears down to the flaws of execution. I shall contend that these failures have ...

India wants to train 500 million people in vocational and technical skills over the next few years. This is, on paper, the most ambitious vocational skills training agenda anywhere in the world. This is old news and the details are well known. The announcements, and subsequent splurging of money have been well documented: The creation of an opportunistic vocational training industry in India, where training firms were created overnight to take advantage of this windfall of public money, is less so. The fact that such efforts have actually gone nowhere in the last few years is usually kept under wraps, because it serves no one to admit that things have gone wrong. However, the need to change things are rather urgent. India's competitiveness is under threat as the skills bottleneck drives up costs and wastage, limiting opportunities for Indian businesses. Besides, expansion of mining activities and industrialisation is driving out a huge rural population into the cities, an...

One of the programmes I have written recently is about preparing Global Professionals.  The rationale for writing such a programme was that with globalisation, all professions need global savvy. It is no longer the preserve of those working on International Trade and Development opportunities, but now it is required for most businesses. And, being global is no longer a preserve or a requirement solely in the Global 'North'. As South-to-South trade increases, and ambitious break-out firms appear in India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey and everywhere else, global thinking becomes an imperative for a much wider spectrum of managers than before. The programme we wrote, titled Global Business Professional , is intended to be a preparation for professionals facing the hyper-global future. As with other things we do at U-Aspire, this programme is not a certification assessed by tests, but a practical, competency-based programme where demonstration of learned concepts are cri...

Employability programmes are hugely interesting, particularly because they are so popular but still means nothing in particular. While employability schools, courses, self-help materials and even, almost absurdly, certifications are cropping up everywhere, inherent in those programmes is an admission of failure of the education process itself. It is like getting another medicine when medicines have failed, which indicates how students approach education - not with the usual, healthy scepticism of a standard consumer, but with faith befitting a true believer, which bestow more than usual responsibility on an educator, though, at the same time, it makes life easy for a snake-oil salesman. However, despite my usual aversion for 'employability' programmes, here I am - designing a programme for global employability! I am not hypocritical: I didn't start this, but this is what the customers want. A number of business schools I have been speaking to want a finishing school pr...

Employability, in Higher Education, seems to be that one thing that everyone wants but no one knows what it is. Therefore, how to train for employability remains both open to interpretation and a subject of intense debate. I have had the privilege to see two sides of the debate in close proximity: Being in the For-Profit Education sector for many years, where employability is the key selling point, I have noted the disdain for such a trivial thing from the other side of the education divide. Things indeed have changed over time: However, sitting through a focus group on an employability training product very recently, I witnessed how uncomfortable university lecturers still are in acknowledging that it is something that their students may legitimately want as an outcome of their education. To be fair, employability was never a Higher Ed thing: Degrees, at a different time, almost always got a job for those willing. The professors, mostly a product of that era, is slightly perplexe...

We are working to construct a new curriculum for undergraduate business training, which will sit at the heart of the new education project we are pursuing. The key premises are simple: 1. We don't see undergraduate business training simply as a mini-MBA. Rather, this is an opportunity to situate business in the wider context of social life and knowledge. The students, rather than thinking 'everything is business', should understand the different domains - family, community life and government - in their own variety and complexity. 2. Accordingly, this training is less about 'how to' than 'why' and 'what' of business life and career. The undergraduate students, who still have many important life decisions ahead of them, would need this broader perspective than the graduate students who may have already made their choice. 3. Additionally, we shall put a great emphasis on the emerging realities of the business - the disruption of business as usu...

Training in India has come of age: The choices, range of courses, price points, geographical spread, availability of trainers, have emerged, carrying the industry a long way off from the duopoly of NIIT-Aptech days. However, despite the progress, two problems seem to afflict the industry still: One, most companies are still trying to be like NIIT or Aptech, and talking about fast, franchise-led growth; and, two, the training is still dominated by derived content from one Western fad or the other, and very little research and development is actually being done in India.  Training in India is an exciting industry. It sits right in the middle of growing population, rising industry demand and a sub-par education system. The opportunity in the sector is, therefore, exciting: It can, and should, play an important catalytic role in helping the Indian industry move to the next level. This role, which will indeed come with increased profitability, demands new thinking, which is in ...

Employability, at the time of writing, is the buzzword in Higher Education, some sort of holy grail defined by the governments, pursued by the institutions and seen as an opportunity by all sorts of companies, including the large ones involved in publishing. A number of initiatives are underway: New websites and apps are being developed, new books being published, and there are even companies which offer 'employability certificates'. In short, the confusion in Higher Education is in full display with this business of employability. This is a worldwide issue. It is an old one in America, and most people are therefore keen to import content from the States. It is a new one in Britain, as the Government of the day has suddenly woken up to it and mandated that every university should publish data on students' employability. It is a critical one for India, where the poor quality private schools are creating a degree inflation but the students are mostly stranded without a j...

Steven Schwartz, the VC of Macquarie University, Sydney, wrote a well-argued piece in Times Higher Education, on the need to 'educate' students rather than just train ( read his article here ). He is clearly right. As the universities abandon their responsibility to educate, the world has become a more dangerous place, full of engineers, doctors, lawyers, managers and statesmen who lack moral judgement of any kind. Besides, this failure, at the same time when an university degree is absolutely essential to get anywhere in life, subverts our ability to make rational choices: What a waste of time and energy it is to spend so many years collectively studying something that gives a formula which is already outdated and does not prepare us for any change in circumstances? The reason I think Professor Schwartz is right on the money is partly because the lessons I have learned dealing with universities over last few years. My impression is that for most universities, quality control i...

I am working on a paper about teaching 'Creativity' at the workplace. I have been fascinated by the various workshops and consultants who teach 'Creative Thinking' to white collar workers, and whose methods range from well-set formulas to the abolition of collar, and everything in between. I must admit my curiosity starts from my rather dim view of managers of all sorts, those poor souls who has no skills other than carrying out orders and shepherding others to carry out orders, those who wants to be as far distant from the customers and as close as to the boss/ the owners as possible, and those who don't even possess the skills of making a cup of tea for themselves but claim to have the solutions which can solve the problems of the world: But then I exaggerate. However, whatever the managers are capable of doing, I wonder, how can they be creative: Isn't management all about maintaining the status quo and not to be creative? This one question pushed me to at...