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.
Foreign Language Professionals In Great Demand
Continuing on the many prospects foreign languages can offer you, i thought of sharing an exciting information here. A one-day workshop was conducted jointly by the University of Hyderabad (HCU) and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in which we came to know that the industry will require around 1,60,000 foreign language professionals by 2010. The University of Hyderabad offers proficiency courses in a few foreign languages already and plans to inaugurate a full fledged centre for teaching foreign languages. It will offer courses in Japanese, French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian initially and more will be added later.
This is promising news indeed and all the more reason for you to consider picking up a foreign language to make yourself employable for lucrative openings coming your way.
More on Careers with Foreign Languages
Continuing on my post on the advantages of learning foreign languages, i thought more details on career opportunities with foreign languages would be helpful. I came across a page providing a comprehensive and detailed list of opportunities and how you need to go about making yourself employable. Openings under the spotlight here are translation, interpretation, language teaching and training and linguistics. The page provides links to several other websites which you may find helpful. Check it out here.
Industry Attempts to Bridge the Gap
“We align the college curriculum with the industry’s requirements, and work with educational bodies towards implementing it. We organize seminars and training sessions for the faculty to give them an industry perspective, enabling them to train the students accordingly.”- this is the motto of Infosys’s Campus Connect initiative. Previously i have posted on the problems ailing our education system and the gap between supply and demand. Where competition is cut-throat and the need to keep up a fast pace vital, the industry can’t wait for Universities and Colleges to revise their curriculum, add new courses and start equipping students with the desired skills. They recognise the potential of India as a provider of quality manpower and are getting up close and personal to ensure the potential is realised and fast.
Over the past few years, big names like Infosys and Wipro have come up with Campus Connect and Academy of Software Excellence respectively to train aspirants eyeing coveted positions in these companies. More companies are following suit and partnering with educational institutions. The partnership results in spreading awareness, letting the students know exactly what is expected out of them in the industry and training to make fresh graduates job-ready. While i personally think such initiatives are praise-worthy and necessary, we shouldn’t leave training and teaching solely to these ventures. I hope our education system changes for the better by observing and learning from every initiative to produce more employable graduates in future.
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.