A kind of Self – Audit or Reflection of oneself identifies 4 categories as per one’s knowledge of own knowledge.
1) One who DOESN’T KNOW and DOESN’T KNOW that he doesn’t know is a FOOL.
2) One who DOESN’T KNOW and KNOW that he doesn’t know is a CHILD and need teachings.
3) One who KNOW and DOESN’T KNOW that he know is ASLEEP and DUMB.
4) One who KNOW and KNOW that he know is WISE and INTELLIGENT.
Who are you ??
Here, I am referring to numerous discussions with people of all ages regarding the education in our country and high rate of unemployment. Data from the various publications implies that education is on the great move and nation has the profound working population (youth of the nation). Ironically, the same publications identify the high and surging rate of unemployment inside the borders. Why so ?? Where are we ??
As per my analysis and readings, this whole game revolves around 3Es (Education - Employability - Employment) while the above datum is taking into account - 2Es. Education doesn’t leads to Employment; there is Employability in between. Education of a person increases her employability and then, in turn, leads to an employment. It seems that, in our system, we are skipping the vital part – employability and trying to jump over to employment directly from education. Even the rate of unemployment is calculated on the basis of number of people who are educated and jobless, again taking into account only 2Es. According to the demands of the market place and the stiff neck to neck to competition in the global economies, education is nothing but literacy – ability to read and write. Being educated is not sufficed to get employment, one has to be employable. Unemployment data should be figured out as unemployed head count only if those unemployed are really employable, not merely educated, and jobless.
My office cab driver once asked me to get a job for him while he was explaining that he did his under graduation in Arts with a degree in honors. He was wordless to my question – “what do you know and what can you do”; meaning he doesn’t know anything and can’t do anything other than driving a cab (that is what exactly he is doing). In fact, his employability quotient is zero, although he is educated or literate. What I saw was sense of dissatisfaction from his education and there are innumerable friends to him, he is not alone.
Our education system is giving lot of engineering graduates year on year, however, these engineers are educated (read as Literate) but not employable. N.R. Narayana Murthy said in one of his interview: “Seventy-five per cent of our engineers are not employable”. Most of the colleges and universities are only educating the students, whether under grads or grads, and not making them employable. Although there are institutions that facilitate lots of opportunities and work towards the student’s employability quotient, the students are not receptive and adaptive to the required changes.
Also, it is not the case that there are scarce jobs in the market. McKinsey said Indian IT can get to about $300 billion by 2020 (from the current $60 billion), for which better and more talent is required. There is no magic silver bullet for this problem. The only solution is to sit down with an open mind and improvise our education system to impart knowledge and excellence along with literacy. No doubt we have achieved high rate of education or literacy, we are still far behind the high rate of employability and employment.
