Blog Series-1: Bridging the gap between learning and needs of corporate – Problem Statement

With growing market needs, Higher Education in India has seen massive growth in recent years; yet we see a wide gap in the supply of quality manpower to meet demand. Recent studies from Hewitt have shown that less than 10 percent (around 65,000) of the graduate and post graduate pool of 650,000 are eligible to undertake R&D related assignments. The reasons could be multifold –

· Unemployable not for the lack of theoretical knowledge but for the lack of skills and attitude necessary for doing the job successfully.
· Lack of finishing school for engineering graduates
· Everyone knows that the vast majority of learning in the workplace is informal, but not so many know how to go about it
· Colleges emphasize very heavily on finding a job as opposed to learning
· Low academic research focus and patent filings
· Universities are giving importance to imparting knowledge instead of creation of knowledge
· The higher educational degree programs are very precisely focused on producing quality graduates with refined technical and mathematical skills which will cater to companies focusing on research and product development (Gaps exists here too). Compounding the problem, we find that the majority of the industry in India as in principle Indian subsidiaries and companies are service providers and/or operating in consumer market that mainly requires engineers for operation, support & maintenance related activities. The conventional higher educational degree programs do not produce talent to meet this market requirement
· Educational institutes has the flexibility and energy to do exploratory projects but no capacity to put it to production
· Companies not having a robust “campus connect” program
· In the Semiconductor and Information Technology area, knowledge comes and goes so quickly that what IT professionals/Designers learned two years ago already becomes outdated today
· Lack of common body to govern faculty and to share best practices
· Absent of yearly scorecard on the Universities to access the performance of Universities on an overall basis and course basis
· No mechanism in place to have the best practices from one university currently not replicated in the others
· No common ground for professors to meet and exchange their views and ideas

All this sums up to - the industry is facing a "quality gap" with regard to talent. Imparting relevant knowledge that is sustainable in the changing conditions is important. Educational institutes should produce engineers with skills which are suitable for wide industries. Having customized programs for “a” industry will defeat the purpose of an educational institute. Skill and knowledge enhancement should be a continuous learning process.

But with so many reasons, I guess the top three problems that chiefly contribute to the widening gap would be:

1. Lack of blended learning – Mix of Informal learning and formal learning
2. Lack of problem based learning in curriculum to get better relevance with the industry wants
3. Lack of interaction between corporate and campus

Since the problems need separate attention and specific ways in which they can be addressed, I will be writing a series, where each blog will highlight a specific problem and some plausible solution to address the problem

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school ...Albert Einstein