Sylla-Bias
Most of our universities and colleges offering technical education seem to realize the importance of English communication skills beside domain knowledge. All the students are required to take a course on English which is designed to focus extensively on communication skills. So where does this course go wrong?
As far as the syllabus is concerned, the emphasis, understandably, is on developing LSRW skills and not on English literature. Students are required to read passages, attempt comprehension questions, develop an understanding for lexical and contextual meanings, listen for general and specific information, practice JAM (Just A Minute) sessions and so on which all sound quite impressive. However, what remains unimpressive is the performance of many students in the interviews.
Several Universities implement the English course only in the first semester. B.Tech is a six semester course. One wonders how much of the English course a student retains at the end of the course unless he/she has kept in touch regularly. One needs to think about there being more courses on English communication or spreading the English course over a considerable part of the entire duration for it to be more effective and helpful for the students.
We also need to understand that the focus of students coming to study engineering will be on the technical courses since they’ll want to be masters of their domain. The English course ends up being looked at as just an extra or even a burden sometimes. I have seen some of my friends studying engineering and for them it’s all about putting up with this trouble rather than taking a serious interest in it. Implementing courses alone won’t serve the purpose. It is up to the lecturer to make the students realize the importance of English communication skills in professional life and devise ways to keep the students interested. In the posts to come, I’ll attempt to look at the lecturers’ approaches to the English courses in engineering colleges.
Raw Deal for the Rural
In India we often have a lot of discussions on our lack of English knowledge. It might come as a surprise to many but India is right up there in terms of the number of people who can speak English. Beating UK and Australia hands down and offering stiff competition to the US, India has to offer a huge English-speaking populace. However, this section is only 4 percent of India’s total population and basically the urban cluster and as of now, this is the cluster the industry has to depend upon for filling up its many vacancies.
Almost all the jobs on offer in the private sector require a good knowledge of English. Being more exposed to the requirements and facilities, city-dwellers are in a better position to occupy vacancies in the Industry. The rural youth, on the contrary, focus more on the public sector as proficiency in English is not vital. According to an article on rediff.com, rural youth would rather take up positions of peons and security guards in the state’s payroll than try for jobs in the private sector which require English. According to the article, the north-eastern states have a different story to tell thanks to their Baptist schools whereas the rest of rural India would rather shy away from the private sector with its imposing demand that candidates be fluent in English.
When we are not providing the rural youth adequate exposure and training, we cannot really blame them for their apprehension of city life and the private sector. We need to urgently realize that a significant change in the education system might just raise the percentage of English speakers in India from 4% to 40%.
Employability in India
I was recently reading an article on rediff.com which discusses the prospects of the BPO industry in India in the coming days. According to the article, the Indian outsourcing industry has entered “a new era of growth” owing to several companies desperately wanting to cut costs and looking to outsource like never before. The article goes on to say that attrition rates have already gone down and are plummeting further.
Though the BPO job market looks promising, we have to wonder whether we have enough quality talent to meet the requirements. Companies ideally want committed candidates possessing all the basic qualifications and skills necessary for the job profile. Unfortunately, finding such talent takes a lot of effort. Infosys, a premier IT firm, hires only 1% of the over 1.5 million applications it receives annually.
Around 2.5 million graduates walk out of the many colleges in India every year- out of which around 400,000 are engineers and 200,000 IT professionals. However, according to NASSCOM, only about half of these graduates are employable. Why does this happen? There are many reasons, one of the most important being that the existing education system is not industry oriented and therefore does not prepare them.
Time to Wake Up
It never fails to surprise me that though the BPO industry has been around for a while now, our educational institutions do not really train the students for it. Students generally have to depend upon the many BPO training institutes that have mushroomed in recent times.
Why this neglect? In our educational institutions we are still holding on to certain traditional career paths coupled with a tendency to look upon new openings with suspicion. Even after being convinced of their benefits, it takes a long time to implement new courses. Our students end up losing out since they are not aware of these opportunities in the first place and are not given the necessary training. This results in a mad rush for the “established” careers when there are plenty of openings elsewhere.