Sunday Posts

The Education-to-Employment transition is one hot debate worldwide, with a host of endeavours, both within traditional education and outside it, directing enormous amounts of money and innovation towards solving it. And, despite all these efforts, gap is just getting wider, and more and more people are completing education but not getting a job. And, besides, if one looks at starting salaries, the problem is even worse - underemployment is rife and level of jobs that these candidates get often do not need the education they have got. All of us possibly know people who did not get a job after finishing education, and indeed, people who are underemployed. But, chances are, we also know people who found their groove, as one would say, after a few years of drifting around. I almost see a pattern with people who come out of school with a degree in, say, Arts, that they would have a succession of poorly paid jobs and internships, and then, the most resilient of them, would actually sta...

There is a conflict at the heart of management - the question of culture. Culture will eat strategy for breakfast, said Peter Drucker, and he, as always, was right on the money. And, yet, culture gets insufficient attention in management practise, although not in management theory. Many small companies, who collectively employ more people than ever, think of the question of culture really as a big company thing.  The underlying view is simple - you worry about culture when you are a big company! It is logical too, because big companies are large, somewhat inorganic entity, having to align diverse elements all the time in pursuit of certain objectives. In contrast, small companies are, well, small, organic entities often consisting of a man and his dog, where the business is defined by the opportunity of the day. The day-to-day reality of the small company makes the question of culture, which is often long term both as a concept and in impact, a luxury. But, the point ...

Simplifications are good for focusing our minds. Without claims of being exhaustive, they are wonderful tools for us to see what really matters. Hence, here is my attempt to portray the story of Independent India in the story of three competing identities. It must be said that the politics of identity is indeed all about simplifications, with the pretencion of being exhaustive. You can be one thing, and nothing else. Though in real life we carry multiple identities - a British Citizen, Indian by heritage, Entrepreneur, Blogger, Teacher, Liberal, Friend, Son, Brother, Husband and Father can all be the description of the same person at the same time - Identity Politics is all about highlighting one primary identity at the expense of all other. In that formulation, a Socialist may become a Socialist Father, even if there is no such thing. But, despite its apparent absurdity when seen in the context of individual life, such simplified identities are the life-blood of group life in th...

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. ...

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...

Whatever Jefferson meant with Pursuit of Happiness, it has become a global mantra. We may like, hate or be indifferent to different aspects of American life and culture, but this essential American Dream now underpins the Chinese Dream, Turkish Dream, African Dream, Indian Dream - dreams everywhere! It has become a governing philosophy, and sometimes at the expense of the other two essential aspects of life Jefferson had in mind. True, happiness means different things to different people. An Indian may see it as a comfortable life alongside his parents, which would perhaps be unbearable for a Brit. A man would define happiness differently from a woman. But, despite all these differences, our society could be defined as one unified in pursuit of happiness. Why did this catch on? When Jefferson was writing, Life would have been the most important goal, given the number of autocrats then ruled the world, followed by Liberty, which was perhaps the point of his writing. Pursuit of Ha...

The time to change Professional Training has come. Despite its prominence, Professional Training hardly features on the agenda of Education Innovators. This is because of its legacy - clearly defined professional bodies, enabled by charters, defining the standards and assessing the competence - and its clear linkages to jobs. In many ways, this is the least broken part of the modern, industrial age, education system. But this is perhaps not the picture one gets to see from inside. The professions, and the national monopolies that they implicitly draw upon, are indeed challenged by the same two forces that are transforming education - globalization and automation! Some professions are more exposed than others, and in some countries more than others, but there is an unmissable case for transformation.  To understand why it is so, one needs to look at the changing nature of professional knowledge. That there is self-service (or should we call it DIY?) in many areas from ...