Brainwashed employability

What are the issues that have been engaging the attention of corporates in India over the past three or four years? It is quite a long list that includes the perennial items such as liberalized and on top of that a lax regulatory regime, tax concessions and finance, each tuned to extracting further subsidies from the government.

But, what I am interested in here is the repeated claim that Indian education system is producing for the most part unemployable graduates, particularly in technology fields. The ratio of employable engineers floats between 20 and 25 percent of engineering graduates.

It may surprise you, but this coordinated attack from newspapers, Indian or foreign, and industry lobby outfits (CII, FICCI, ASSOCHAM, NASSCOM), joined by high profile consultancy organizations like McKinsey, on technical education as to its irrelevance in the industry is the thin edge of the wedge to push open the subsidy gates wider still. The argument goes thus: the educational institutions are failing in their duty to prepare students to serve the industry and hence industry is suffering. It needs subsidies. So simple, is it not?

You think I am exaggerating? Let me take you through an article entitled The great mismatch (called the Schumpeter blog) in The Economist of December 8^th, 2012 (http://www.economist.com/news/business/21567885-skills-shortages-are-getting-worse-even-youth-unemployment-reaches-record-highs-great maybe behind a pay-wall now). The strapline says “Skills shortages are getting worse even as youth employment reaches record highs”. The implication is, given that human resource is aplenty and job opportunities are equally galore, the educational system is failing society.

OK, the focus is on vocational education, the world shifting away from the German model. At a few removes I can vouch for this model. At IIT Madras, an Indo-German educational initiative of the government more than six decades ago, I have had workshop practice for eight hours a day, for eight weeks of a 16 week semester, for two semesters. That is, 50% of one full year. However, despite this intensive training I got no better at working with hands. That is the failure of an individual and the institution does not share in the blame.

But in the current one-sided “debate” on unemployability the blame quickly, quite evidently and irreversibly shifts to the ivory towerization of education, with South Korea deserving special mention in the referred article.

Yet, what is surprising is that the academia has been completely muzzled in this “debate”. I have not heard a single word of dissent against this claim. Could it be that the claim somehow works to the advantage of the academia, even if not in the interests of the students? Silly me, I just fail to see this advantage. I may come to this later.

The matter of unemployability, as being played out, has so much traction no one is ready to ask even the basic question: How ready should fresh graduates be to contribute to the bottom lines of businesses even as they emerge from the educational cocoons? Note that I am not going into topics that can be easily and contemptuously dismissed as airy-fairy, such as what is education etc. I am asking a question that can be answered in measurable metrics, like the gestation period of six months, one year.

I just heard a growl from the corporates. “What do you think, that I pay out of my pocket as the graduate gets ready to contribute to my bottom line? My competitors will not be doing such charity work and I will be left behind. Thanks but no thanks.” This is how business empires justify and thrive on the public contributing to their bottom lines!

Referring back to Schumpeter, I read “India’s Institute for Literacy Education and Vocational Training sends people to villages to speak to families about the opportunities on offer with blue-chip companies such as Taj Hotels and Larsen & Toubro.” I would tend to think that the institute is at worst a government funded one, or at best along the vaunted PPP model.

Why are the corporates not going to villages on their own to spread the news about the opportunities? They respond, “Why should we, and take a big bite on our bottom lines?” This is the implicit subsidy I referred to earlier. You may have heard that Microsoft “volunteers” its employees’ time (robbing Peter to pay Paul!) to high schools! Even that our corporates appear loath to do.

Perhaps I am being a little too tough on businesses. I know there are companies, L & T included, which have training schools for specific skills. But, the group that loudly decries the educational system includes them. Am I to suspect, then, that these companies are intent on shifting the task-specific training burden on to the educational institutions? Is this the limit of education?

If this is so, then that gives a window into the thinking of India Inc.’s ideas of education. It is what I would call down-into-the-dumps, just the opposite of airy-fairy. The article mentions, “China Vocational Training Holding specialises in matching students with jobs in the Chinese car industry …” Note the specificity – almost like “horses for courses”, students for industries. Once you are in, you are trapped; you cannot be out. In India, “IL&FS Skills … gives students guarantee of a job if they finish its courses.” Here, it is skills and not education.  

Now, a few words about NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies), the mouthpiece for the most part of the ITeS industry. It knows that its voice will have no relevance in the wider landscape. After all, what kind of education do they actually demand? First and foremost, accented English speaking skills (OK, I am exaggerating, but perhaps not by much)! Hence, it merely adds to the chorus. Over the years, the IT industry lobby groups have spread the canard that they have climbed up the value chain in providing services. At best this claim can only be minimally true and indeed, those companies and ventures that do require talents at the higher levels do not seem to find talent pickings too thin.

Indian technology/engineering prowess is not like a one horse town, the ITeS horse. But, this is what the loudmouths at NASSCOM claim.

The above is not to claim that everything is hunky dory in Indian engineering education. I work in an engineering consultancy firm and I should know. Fresh graduates definitely do not come industry-ready. But, what is more discouraging, at least in my opinion, is that they are not even engineering-prepared.

To explain that, I may have to take a detour. Recently, there is much talk of un-pigeonholing engineering. Engineering science is the buzzword. The erstwhile Bengal Engineering College has been renamed and is now apparently dually mandated – Bengal Engineering and Science University. The name implies an organic and synergetic connection between engineering and science. I feel this is the way to go.

In my vocabulary, engineering-prepared means knowing the why of what engineers do. Leveraging science in engineering helps in this process. I do not down grade diploma studies from the so-called trade schools (by the way, in the 1920s and 30s Massachusetts Institute of Technology was considered a glorified trade school, if you could imagine that!) but these do teach only what to do in engineering practice and not why we do what we do. Knowing what to do, of course, is necessary for engineering graduates as much as for diploma holders.

Let me quote a great structural engineering academic to whom design engineers, at least of the generation immediately preceding mine, should be deeply indebted, Prof. Hardy Cross. Talking about codes and standards, he said: “Standardization, as a check on fools and rascals or set up as an intellectual assembly line, has served well in the engineering world.”

Civil engineering, perhaps more than other engineering disciplines, truly relies upon codes and standards, the only way to gain credibility with the public. This is precisely where the difference between a graduate engineer and a diploma engineer becomes stark. It is this essential and critical difference that is sought to be effaced by the industry’s call for graduates to be industry-ready, and shifting the burden onto the educational institutions. As it is, our codes and standards are pretty much copies of what obtains in the UK, US, Australia and such other developed nations. Just imagine how much more we will slip down this slope should we demand complete diplomatization of engineering education.

In the context of engineering education, we also need to ask why industry R&D is non-existent, except perhaps in the pharmaceutical industry. Industry will not help in research, the training it does offer will be skill-specific, but will demand industry-ready (in reality, task-ready) engineers from educational institutions. If we gave in to this demand, we can say a long good bye to our innovation profile, which anyway is languishing in the lowest of the lowest rungs of the ladder.

In conclusion, let me say that graduating engineers must be responsive to their employer’s demands, yet going beyond the bottom-line fixation. They should follow set precedents but should not be slave to them. Billy Joel may have claimed, “We didn’t start the fire”, but graduate engineers are the only ones who are capable of starting the fire and they should start one. They should have a controlled spark of rebelliousness. They must be engineering-prepared and be prepared to be industry-capable.

The current clamor for industry-ready engineers must be muted. Trade schools, yes. But say no to trade-schoolization of engineering degree programs. The why is as important as the what of engineering practice. Ignore industry lobbies. Listen to the cries of enlightened engineering. Stay deaf to the siren song of employability. Refuse to be brainwashed.

I am neither an academic nor a practicing engineer in its true sense. But, I am concerned about both. The post is my prescription to locate the balancing point in the debate on employability – be an engineer and serve the profession across the spectrum of tasks and duties. Know your whys and whats.

Raghuram Ekambaram