Sunday Posts

I wrote previously about the futility of Career Planning and recommended Career Design instead. ( See here ) The modern workplaces are fast changing. McKinsey points to four Global Trends, each powerful on its own right, which are reshaping the work and the workplaces. These trends are Urbanisation, Technology (Automation, Micro-manufacturing), Demographics (Aging workforce, Young workforce) and indeed Globalisation. As all of these forces reach a tipping point, and therefore, industries are disrupted and new industries and players emerge, the hands-off rational approach of planning a career looks terribly out of date. There are no other ways of appreciating the forces at work other than experiencing them first hand. There is no rational way of coping with such change, since we do not know what the changes could be, but creating a practical, practise orientation, one of adaptability and infinite adjustments. And, in context, what one likes or dislikes, what trade-offs one would make,...

One tends to focus on technological possibilities when debating whether the college has a future. The traditional brick-and-mortar institution often seem too costly and too limiting, from a technological perspective, and therefore, its demise is commonly foretold. But the college continues to defy these death-wishes often by consolidating its prestige and attracting ever more students to it. In most countries in the world, colleges can not take all the students that apply to it, and are often not allowed to charge as much fee as the students are willing to pay to get in, and in such circumstances, the college isn't going to fade out any time soon. The mortal danger of the college, on the contrary, come from another angle, the lack of hope of change. The point of education is change, for better. College education does not stand for a vacant time for the society to figure out what to with its youngsters - it needs to have a specific purpose for all those preparations and troubl...

In next week's General Election, I intend to vote Labour. I am not a traditional Labour voter. I am first generation Asian migrant, with a professional background and generally belong to Asian professional circles and neighbourhood. Most of the people I socialise with are likely to vote conservatives, and some of them, in time, will perhaps join the Tory party. I have not voted Labour in the last election, and have not agreed with many of its policies while it was in Government. I pay my taxes, and never taken any benefits nor thought of doing it. I don't know the local Labour candidate, nor has she campaigned too ardently in the locality I live in. On the other hand, I know the incumbent Conservative MP, a very likable one, and several of my friends are actively campaigning for him. And, yet, I made up my mind now to vote Labour. Indeed, I would have never voted for the Tories in the first place. There are several reasons for this, but essentially, I see the Conserva...

Private Higher Ed in the UK, as well as Higher Education in general, took a huge hit from the last General Elections. The Coalition government, over the last five years, effectively destroyed the business model of UK Higher Ed, and replaced it with a badly thought-through model that was stillborn. On the private Higher Education side, which was largely dependent on International students, the ever-changing regulations and poor implementation were catastrophic, allowing only the very crooked and completely dishonest to survive. In a way, the last election and its aftermath demonstrated fully how politicians can damage a whole sector. Hence, with another election due next week, it is worth thinking about what this might bring. In this discussion, the policy towards International students must feature prominently. Several reasons for this. First, the Private Higher Ed in Britain was always dependent on International Students till the last government changed it and made it dependent ...

There are two problems in modern education - access and relevance.  Access is an economic issue, and it is mainly a developing country issue. The developed countries mostly have access issues sorted out, through various funding mechanisms, particularly educational loans. In developing countries, however, a number of issues come in the way of access, including physical (there are no schools to go to), social (people of certain caste, class or gender are not welcome) and indeed, financial (one can not pay for school or afford to be in the school).  Relevance, on the other hand, is a more complex issue, and afflicts developed countries as well as the developing. At one level, educational relevance is about whether the person is getting educated at all, and we know that many people come out of school/ college not being able to do even the basic tasks meant for that level of education. And, at another, related, level, education does not deliver the expected outcome, job, ...

Investing in education is the rage. Given that there is a really big problem globally - of educational access as well as educational relevance - investing to create solutions that can scale is naturally attractive. At the same time, however, education does not scale very well, given the regulation, cultural barriers and deeply held conservatism that come with it. The current models of education, the ideal of personalised instruction, models of exclusive privilege, the idea of deep thinking away from the humdrum of daily life, the connotation of cultural development as a slow process, are all anti-scale. In fact, many people will privately deride any goals of scaling education, the idea that education is only for a privileged few is so entrenched. The investors in new educational models put their faith on technology. Technology can help scale the classroom and beat the cost disease of education, as conceptualised by economists William Baumol and William Bowen. The point is to r...

My silence over the last few weeks - I did only a few posts since the beginning of April - was only partly intentional. As much I would like to claim I was busy, I was on holiday, traveling through Middle Europe and taking a train journey through the Alps, something I wanted to do for a long time. A family of friends joined us, so all this was family and friends time, as relaxing I could perhaps ever expect. It was full of beautiful sights, the grandeur of Vienna rather overwhelmed by dark romantic Prague and natural magnificence of Salzburg mountains, and of contrasting experience, very touristy Sound of Music trip around Salzburg contrasted starkly with a monastery stay at the centre of Vienna. It was my time to be with others, and go around in a bus ride across Schonbrunn Palace endlessly for a day, and of being myself, an early morning walk through Bergstrasse to stop across the road from No. 19, where Freud lived and worked most of his life.  But, this holiday, and the f...

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...

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...

At a recent event, the oft-mentioned terms - Digital Native and Digital Immigrant - were invoked, with the cast-iron borders set by birth on or before 1985. I come from the wrong country here, but that is only part of my discomfort with the doctrine. This, and other generational divides, handy as they are, represent, for me, both a tendency to generalise and at the same time, to divide, representing two wrong ideas at once. My first problem with this doctrine is even more personal than my age. Are the immigrants not the drivers of change and innovation? At a time when immigrants are being called Feral Human Beings by The Sun, the hateful British newspapers which would give up decency for sensation at the drop of a hat, being hunted down by bullies in South Africa, being demonised in Mexico and Germany, they are still proof of human energy and human enterprise, an essential part of what made the world we live in. Civilisations, as much as they may seem to be, are not monoculture -...