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...

I wrote earlier about my recent experiences regarding the design of education for 'employability' and the field of constraints that any design must consider (see here: Limitations ).  The focus of that earlier post was on the educational side of the equation, which is not the only constraint for consideration. In fact, an even bigger challenge is right at the centre of the employability initiatives - the myth of the employers!  The mythical employer (employers, more correctly) who is invoked all the time in the employability talk has one problem - she does not exist! The logic of the employability initiatives - that employers demand certain abilities which universities can not educate for - is based on employers being fully aware and being able to fully articulate what they want. However, it is time to say, after Steve Jobs, that employers do not know what they want. This may seem anachronistic: After all, employers are the customers for employability initiatives, right? But a...

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...

Employability is now serious business. Governments ask about employability outcomes and rankings depend upon it. 'Disruptive' start-ups raise millions of dollars to fix student employability. The assumption is because employability should be measurable, measuring it is the best way to understand if education has been effective. That assumption is wrong. This is simply because there are many dimensions of employability outside the educators' control. The assumption of a flat-world job market, with skills and wages working as a pricing mechanism, is wrong. Wages are almost always inflexible, even in a non-unionised workplace; there is always minimum wage, but more importantly, organisational structures limit the level of flexibility. Employability is also shaped by implicit bias, of the employer or the society at large, which sets expectations based on race, gender, age, sexuality, physical appearance or accent. Students are also not completely mobile: They may prefer...

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...

The big idea in private higher education is Skills. With a big S.  The argument goes that the traditional Higher Ed spends too much time disseminating Knowledge, and does not focus adequately on Skills. This is why we have an 'employability' problem today - too many graduates in non-graduate jobs with stagnating wages and no prospects of progression - and by putting skills at the heart of education, this can all be magically transformed. This argument may sound superficial and one can justifiably argue that the distinction between skills and education is an artificial one. Besides, one may also contend that the employability problem is more a labour market problem than an education problem: The structure of the economy is rapidly changing and that, rather than any educational deficiency, has caused the jammed elevator of middle-class life. And, finally, it can further be argued that at the heart of the problem is antiquated - though not unjustified - expectation a...

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 ...

Employability training is big business.  As the disconnection between education and work gets wider, the efforts to bridge the gap moves from the fringes of the education enterprise to its centre-stage and even emerges as an independent form of Higher Ed by itself. In fact, making students employable at scale is the most favoured education model for venture capital backing, spawning a range of models and ideas, each claiming to be the ultimate global solution for employability. These global models have failed rather miserably, but new ones still keep coming. This may seem counterintuitive, but this is where ideology trumps rationality and experience. A walk through the graveyard of failed ideas should point towards two key problems: One, that there is no 'global service industry', the foundational assumption of doing employability at scale, and two, that employability, even in its narrowest sense, requires personal transformation, not just acquisition of ski...

Before I make the case for hiring failed entrepreneurs, I must state that I have heard this - for the first time - from someone else. Sure, I can passionately argue about the failed entrepreneurs, having been an entrepreneur and having failed a few times. But that I heard this first from Jim Sphor, Global Head of IBM's University Partnership Programme makes it more than my own idle chatter. When Jim Spohr said that, in a workshop about Higher Education's future where I was present, there was a visible excitement in the room, hashtags rippling into Twitter with surprise and deja-vu feeling in equal measure. That very cold morning in Utah, Jim's main point was about T-Skills, how the ideal employee for IBM should possess one or two deep expertise and a lot of different abilities and interests at the same time. He would go on to arrange the annual T-Skills summit at Michigan State soon after. But it's really when he made the comment about failed entrepreneu...

If we follow the talk, the future of jobs is bleak. Software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen loves to claim, and he means it literally. Economists are now studying the probability that jobs such as Taxi Drivers and Restaurant Waiters would be automated in all seriousness. Technology seems to be reaching a tipping point that would transform the workplace. In context, educators are right to be worried about the future of their students. There are things being said to mollify the duly anxious: That while the emergent technologies may destroy some of the jobs (in one estimate, 47% of the occupation groups employing three-quarters of the current workforce), it would create new jobs which we have not seen yet. While this is most certainly true and new professions will arise, such statements hide the fact that new economy jobs are just too few to offset the loss of old ones: Kodak, with its 130,000 employees, giving way to Instagram, with a dozen employees at the time, is illust...

There are things we know: That as technologies change rapidly, there is a hollowing out of the Middle Class jobs. Some jobs, like the Telephone Operator, have become extinct; some others, like Secretaries and Receptionists, have become less ubiquitous; and yet others, like the Book-keepers, are being driven into obsolesce. Just like automation of an earlier kind marginalised the factory worker (Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, remember), the automation is now coming for the middle class lives and suburban lifestyles. Even those jobs created by technologies - the Call Centre worker and others - are now facing competition from newer generations of technologies, such as Voice Recognition. And, the indication is that this will intensify further, and transform the domains that were hitherto deemed safe: Jobs such as Accountants, Taxi Drivers, Legal Clerks and even Waiters and Cooks. The economies that benefited greatly from the globalisation's last wave - India comes to mind - will be...

I notice a strange disconnect in my conversations with Employers. If one asks what they are looking for in new recruits, they tend to talk about soft skills: Initiative, Team Work, Communication etc. But when they write person-specifications and seek to recruit, it becomes a conversation about technical skills, at least mostly. So, how important are soft skills, really? It should be very important, as all of those who ever worked in a commercial environment know. One must navigate the organisational life, and that needs soft skills. The moments one is in front of customers, soft skills are super-important, critical. And, progress in professional life hinges on soft skills too. No wonder one of our customers reportedly said,"I hire for technical skills but fire for Professional Skills". Two things come to mind. First, the relative importance of soft skills versus technical skills vary depending on who in the organisation one is speaking to. The business managers, tho...

I wrote earlier about how, by expecting too much of them, we have positioned college degrees to fail ( See here ). The college and its degrees became, effectively, a tool for the ever expansive state to control another aspect of lives of its citizens. The poverty of this formula becomes apparent at this point in time, when the state is no longer expanding and the promises of middle class life, that pursuit of happiness, looks more hollow than ever. Yet, despite the 'credential-equals-job' mindset that we have all grown up with - and the brutal realisation that it does not, not anymore - we are somewhat caught in this argument that we do not have an alternative credential that we can trust, and therefore, we have to keep sending people to Higher Ed, keep the spectacle going. But there is an alternative credential that we can trust, that all employers look for - the CV! A CV, a portfolio of experiences and verifiable references, is the credential we build and carry through ou...

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...

As Machine Learning becomes real, our minds are focusing on what really is human. There has been a flurry of publications, both scholarly and popular, exploring this - some looked at which areas humans can trump the machines, and others at how to organise the human society when we arrive at the age of intelligent machines. We are looking at anywhere between 2030 to 2045 for Singularity to be achieved - the machines become generally intelligent then (instead of the current special purpose intelligence they are now programmed with) - and while some may have a different view on this, no one is doubting their effect on the workplace. Automation is reconfiguring all human work, and by extension human societies. It is time to explore what this really means. There are some excellent studies that I wrote about earlier which assess what humans can do better than machines. These superior human abilities, as Researchers figure out, fall under three categories - Dexterity (our fingers and bo...

Employment may not be the only goal of Higher Education, as some educators will justifiably claim, but it is certainly one of the goals.  A good Higher Education have a great impact in building character, making one free, able to appreciate beauty, cooperate with other people and bring change. Wesleyan's Michael Roth will say that the goal of education is to liberate, animate, cooperate and agitate, and Howard Gardner sum it up as the quest for Truth, Beauty and Goodness. But, beyond this ideal of education, the political nature of the education enterprise that also must be acknowledged. After a century and half of expansion of public Higher Education, Higher Ed has a clearly embedded political purpose, that of lending legitimacy to the governments as they thrive on the idea of a Middle Class society, where everyone has access to opportunity in life through Higher Education. Consequently, the enrollments in Higher Education have expanded rapidly, and in a way, what used to be...