Myopic Mantras

Some comments of Mr. Som Mittal President Nasscom and Mr. Rajendra Pawar Chairman Nasscom in the ongoing Nasscom HR Summit -

Mr. Som Mittal: 'The Indian information technology is in need of more ‘specialists' even as the industry is tapping new markets and getting engaged with new global customers...Our colleges produce research students but not specialists in a sector...The number of engineering colleges has nearly doubled to 3,300 from 1,700, and around 6,50,000 graduates enter the job market every year. This number will increase to one lakh in the next couple of years. Graduates should not only be trainable but also employable, then companies would not need to spend 18 weeks on training...The industry annually spends nearly $1.3 billion on training and ‘re-skilling' students, putting enormous pressure on companies' operating costs. “We need to increase the pool of trainable people."

Mr. Rajendra Pawar: "With nearly 3.7 million students getting into higher education each year, the challenge is to make them industry ready as they pass out from the colleges."

Fundamentally I have a difference of opinion on two issues:

a) Generalists versus specialist: Being in business school for little more then 11 years now, I have seen this classical dilemma very closely. What do you expect school to produce? Retail comes and wants students to be retail-specialists, IT comes and they want students to be IT-specialists; likewise every industry expects students to be specialist in that particular industry. This is true for business schools as well as true to a large extent for trade schools. So what do expect school to do? Business schools instead of having specilizations like Marketing, Finance, HR, etc. to have specializations like Finance for IT, Finance for Retail, Finance for Media...
In my opinion  the content that is given to the students in schools has to be largely generalist-content which develops their decision-making abilities and makes them ready to adapt to different conditions and use their knowledge and skills that they have acquired in these schools for finding solutions to various problems that they encounter. Of course' part of their content also needs to be specialist-content with focus on specific industries. But that cannot over-rule the former. Otherwise we run the danger of producing too narrow specialists who do not know what to do once the context changes.

b) Skill-Gap...What skill Gap? - I have been hearing this rant for quite sometime now - 'there is a severe skill-shortage... gaps needs to be plugged...students have to become more employable...schools need to make students more industry-ready.' For sometime I also fell in this 'trap'. However I am of the opinion that there is no real skill-gap ( I am not saying that contemporary skills are not required). All this skill-gap story that we hear is only an attempt by the industry to 'shift' the cost of training to educational institutions. Instead of creating robust employee training infrastructure and facilities, the companies are very conveniently trying to transfer this responsibility (often read as burden) to the schools. And 'skill-gap story' is a convenient way of branding (or say masking) this no-ble strategy.

Both these 'initiatives' are myopic and are going to hit industry hard in the long-run. In today's dynamic and volatile environment, as much you require specialists, the need for strong generalists who can bring in diverse perspectives cannot be discounted. And 'engaging' these talent through development of contemporary skills that acts like a symbiotic-link, helping both the company (in achieving their goals) and the employees (in personal, professional and career development) has to be the direction.

Globally the companies who have made it truly in the big-league have never made any such rants. Instead they have gone ahead with blending talent in their companies and in transforming their companies into 'talent-factory'. Whirlpool has 'Whirlpool Virtual University', Disneyland has 'University of Disneyland', McDonald has 'Hamburger University', Sony, Google, Toyotas of the world have followed the same strategy.

But then another question that needs to be answered is - are we trying to create such institutions in the first place?