Archive for the ‘Education System’ Category
More Endeavours to Improve Employability
Every day, more and more institutions are waking up to the fact that students passing out from their portals are not equipped enough to contribute to the industry. What they are lacking is employability skills. The institutions are worried because a dip in campus placements reflects poorly on their capabilities. They know that the best way to attract students is to show them a long list of successfully placed candidates. In order to ensure the development of soft skills, they are tying up with companies, training institutes and universities like IGNOU. Among the soft skills, effective communication is given the most importance as most students are weak in this area. Click here to read a report about it.
Online Learning:A Video
There is nothing better than seeing something in action when you are trying to understand it. In India, online learning still is a mystery and a lot of us are clueless as to how it all works. Well it is a lot more than interacting with someone online and learning through the discussion. It’s about devising learning theories, developing effective content, making things visually appealing and simple to understand. This video that I came across talks about a few aspects of online learning and communities which are working for its betterment and effective implementation. You will get a better idea about how instructors are working in this field and some learning methodologies that they resort to. More videos and information to come on this exciting field.
Look Before You Leap
Undoubtedly, new courses that are being introduced in various colleges all over India are bringing in a whole new attitude to job hunting and a variety of new skills for students to equip themselves with. Several times in this blog I have talked about the necessity of these courses and how important it is to look beyond the obvious and explore new avenues. However, we need to take a look at the dark side of this as well where education and business get intertwined.
Many of these upcoming courses are job oriented and require extensive exposure to the industry, good infrastructure and knowledgeable faculty. Riding on the wave of students waking up to these new opportunities, institutions are springing up every other day in an effort to cash in on the awareness and make money. These institutions offer diplomas and degrees in unconventional courses and promise much to the students. However, most of these colleges are set up in a hurry with very little consideration towards what is required to handle the courses in the right way. So after spending a year or two in a college you might still find yourself ill-equipped to carry out the responsibilities you will be entrusted with.
It is advisable therefore to know more about an institution before joining it. It might be offering the courses you want to take but does it have all that it takes to make a success story out of you? Talk to former students of the college, look through its placement record and try to gather as much information as possible. Go for it once you are reasonably satisfied.
Training Blues
While everyone agrees upon the advantages of students equipping themselves with good communication skills, what is neglected is the prospect of professionals who can train the students. I am talking about the teachers in various Engineering colleges here. It goes without saying that to be successful as a teacher in this field, one needs to have a clear understanding of the needs of the industry and the kind of communication skills desired. By and large, the industry requires its workforce to be aware of domain-specific scientific and technical vocabulary, ability to speak politely and positively, reporting, clear and precise writing and making presentations. Now the question is how many teachers teaching English courses in our Engineering colleges possess these skills?
Many of the teachers recruited by engineering colleges are graduates or post-graduates in English where the emphasis is on English literature. As a result, they are largely unaware of the demands of the industry and most of the English course outline handed out is lost on them. They struggle to make sense of the technical vocabulary and other Industry-specific nuances. Upon asking, I was told by people in the Industry that during their college days, their English teachers often found themselves as baffled by the syllabus as them. Nowadays some reputed institutions like EFLU are offering courses on TEFL/TESL which are attempting to address such demands but good courses of this kind remain few and far between. With the growing demand for professionals with good communication skills, opportunities galore for teachers/trainers who can impart these skills as well. The sooner we realize this, the better.
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.