Posts Tagged ‘colleges’
Study As You Like in Community Colleges
Education is trying to seamlessly fit into every lifestyle and is taking varied responsibilities into consideration. Not everybody can follow the rules laid down by conventional means of imparting education and more and more people are realizing and respecting this fact. This is why we are seeing the upsurge of online learning and distance learning which are great alternatives for people who are unable to make it to schools and colleges. Future education, training and communication will be largely online and it looks all set to pervade all corners. It’s little surprise then that states are considering community colleges for the purpose of education of all levels.
A community college lets you pursue your degree the way you want it. You have the option of attending regular face-to-face classes, you can choose to take your programme online and you can opt for a part-time or a full-time course. Thus community colleges are a one-stop-shop for all kinds of courses. You can enroll for an associate degree in various fields which will enable you to get admitted to a college or university for completion of degree. Karnataka’s first initiative, the Geeta Ramanujam Educational Institution (GREI), is off the mark with 29 students who have signed up for associate degree courses. The certificates will be given by IGNOU and the job-oriented courses will ensure that students get employed soon after course completion.
Looking forward to more such initiatives in other states of India. With this, the vision of bringing education to everybody is getting brighter by the day.
Wipro BPO to Train Potential Employees
Sometime back I had written about hiring activities in Wipro BPO. From the looks of things, the recruitment drive is still on and Wipro is getting up close and personal with the process. Faced with the fact that graduates coming out of the various colleges typically lack employability skills and the colleges do little to improve the situation, Wipro signed a MoU with the Acharya Nagarjuna University (ANU) to take the responsibility of training emerging graduates. Under the scheme, students who are passing out of regular degree colleges and who possess decent communication skills, will be trained by Wipro and subsequently absorbed.
Apart from requirements for its BPO, Wipro also needs people for various other positions such as technical support executives, human resources, accounting, supply chain and others. In order to make the most of the MoU, officials from Wipro will visit different colleges and identify students who would be suitable for these positions. The identification will be followed by a training programme where the potential employees will be trained to handle the various responsibilities and will be made to experience what working in Wipro is all about.
The company has announced two recruitment drives already for the PB Siddhartha College of Arts & Science. One in September and the second in November.
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.
Universities Outsourcing The Examination and Evaluation Process
Admission is not possible without completion of all the formalities and formalities include submission of mark sheets and relevant certificates. For several renowned universities and institutions which see students coming from all over India, the formalities lead to major problems. As students come from various colleges and universities and each of them have their respective dates for the declaration of results, the students often fail to provide all the necessary documents resulting in denial of admission or grant of a provisional admission. Without a doubt, things will be much simpler if all institutions declare their results together.
An initiative along those lines is being taken in the state of Karnataka where the Examination Reforms Committee has suggested that a Karnataka State Universities Examination Authority (KSUEA), an autonomous institution to conduct examinations on behalf of all the universities, be set up so that results of all the universities of Karnataka can be declared at one time. This will reduce the burden of the universities as they won’t have to spend time on evaluations and preparation of mark sheets and can use the time to focus on academics. A panel of experienced professors will be roped in for evaluation and the authority may be run in a corporate style with a CEO at the helm. The sole function of this body will be to conduct and evaluate examinations while the degrees will be awarded by the respective universities.
If the proposal is accepted then Karnataka may become the initiator of a major makeover that will change the face of our education system. Hopefully this process will make the evaluation process faster and more efficient. However what I will be looking forward to is a system that will not just serve a state but the entire country so that delays in declaring results, malpractice, complaints about evaluation and re-examinations will be drastically reduced.
Stop by the Finishing School For Job Training on Your Way to the Industry
Conducting finishing schools for students on the threshold of entering the industry is emerging as a welcome initiative. I have come across several reports of colleges and universities arranging finishing schools which are all about putting the icing on the cake. Throughout the years spent on their courses, students have been made to focus primarily on theory and domain knowledge. However, as it is well known, you need a lot more than just domain knowledge to make yourself the right choice for recruiters. Finishing schools attempt to equip students with all the necessary extras to make them employable.
To instill confidence in the students to face recruitment tests and interviews, finishing schools train the participants in all they can expect from the selection process. Effective communication, logical reasoning, numerical and analytical prowess, group discussions and interviews are put under the limelight and plenty of practice sessions enable students to form a reasonably clear idea of the kind of questions that await them in the tests and interviews. Some finishing schools also incorporate workshops where students get trained in some important software which they will have to work with on a daily basis.
Much as I admire this concept, I hope institutions do not leave everything to the finishing schools and keep training students as they pursue their courses. Otherwise the finishing schools might be left with too much to handle and too little time in which to handle everything.
Make Learning Fun
As English is being looked at as a language of opportunity, more and more people are flocking to various training centres and colleges to hone their English skills. As someone proficient in English, this opens up new opportunities for you as a language trainer. The demand for English language trainers is high not only in India but across various countries where English is not the first language. Needless to say that to make the most of this lucrative opportunity, you need to have a good command over English. However, we have seen several times that learned men do not always make good teachers. So before considering a career in language training you need to work on your teaching abilities as well.
In a training institute or college, you will come across students who can speak English but suffer from lack of fluency, confidence and so on as well as students who have to be taught from scratch. It is important to identify the various levels and assign different time slots so that you can give every level the necessary attention. However what is most important according to me is that you need to ensure that your students are having fun while learning. Abstain from making your sessions resemble grammar schools or dull English classrooms. Think out of the box and come up with word games, contests and creative activities (such as composing slogans, poems etc) which will make your students look forward to attending your session.
There is nothing like learning through fun. Picking up a language, or any skill for that matter, becomes something to enjoy and makes the teacher immensely popular and successful in the process.
New Courses on the Block
A lot of criticism has been directed at our education system from various directions including this blog for good reason and now is the time to look at some positives. Gradually several new and job-oriented courses are making their presence felt in colleges and universities and looking at the list, we have to applaud the effort. The system has been slow, thereby depriving a lot of promising students, but we can look forward to the future.
Among the new courses, mention should be made of news reading, public administration, packaging, fire safety, banking and investment management. As the industry diversifies and looks for people with specific skills for specific domains, these courses are looking to cater to the demands.In the upcoming posts i will be exploring these courses in greater detail.
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.
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.