A leading publication had this to say recently:
“While 13 million youth join the workforce every year the following statistics about employable youth are increasingly troubling:
· One in Four MBAs
· One in Five Engineers
· One in Ten Graduates
are truly employable.”
Indeed, the above statistic, if true, is troubling. However, the term “unemployable” gets thrown around a lot by many people who either don’t have a skin in the game and are just self-proclaimed pundits without doing a deep dive into its real nature or cause. As we all know, our ability to grasp new concepts and learnings is highest in our younger days, where the so called “neural pathways” for learning are newly established. Our schools and colleges have the dubious distinction of suppressing a child’s creative thinking process by straightjacketing her abilities into a prison of rigid routine of syllabus, tests and grades. By the time the child grows into a young adult and goes into college her intellect is already tamed into going through more of the same routine.
College is the doorstep to the real world. It would seem essential that colleges would prepare youngsters for life outside the hitherto sheltered confines of childhood and teen years by exposing them to real world situations and preparing them to find their way through those situations. Having sat through hundreds of interview processes involving college graduates I find a deep disconnect between what is taught in school (college) and what the real world expects at the minimum, out of these graduates.
So why is that? Why is there a disconnect? I feel the root cause is the inability of our education system to move with times. I would often come across syllabus being taught the same way as it was taught 10 years ago by professors and faculty who had very little exposure to real industry, let alone be part of it. I find well meaning faculty, no doubt steeped in theoretical aspects, but struggling to customize their teaching content or pedagogy in a way that is concurrent to what their students would find in real companies when they graduate from college.
If I were to be the decision maker, I would make it mandatory for college teachers to work in industry for some time, even have them complete an “internship” in a company relevant to the department they are teaching in.
I know this might not be welcome in many cases, but that is what real “industry-academia” collaboration will be – equal and free flow of ideas between the two. I am sure there will be enough “cross-pollination” to ensure students (and teachers, I might add) are exposed to what the industry wants. After all, industry is the “customer” where colleges are in a sense, providers of employable manpower!!
Students entering college are raw, with some basic understanding of the world around them, of foundational knowledge systems, ready to be “moulded” into productive professionals. No one at that stage is “unteachable”. I refuse to believe that some students are “bright” and others not. Every young person has his or her strong points unique to them. Every student is “learnable”. She is like a sponge, ready to absorb a knowledge system that interests her, assures her of a rewarding professional career while doing justice to her personal goal. It is the responsibility of teachers and colleges to foster a learning culture unique to that student, where she will flourish, which might be totally different with another student who will have a different stage from where to excel.