Currently, soft skills are catching up, and their importance is being felt more than ever as employees are often fired due to a dearth of soft skills. Students find it difficult to get employed because they lack soft skills. Although Indian students are technically strong, they still lack the skills to present themselves to interview boards, thus losing employment opportunities. There is more of an unemployability problem than an unemployment problem in India.
Indian education—challenges and solutions
It is disheartening to note that the Indian education system is producing educated illiterates. It is here that the collective role of all stakeholders, such as faculty, recruiters, students, and directors of educational institutions, becomes imperative. There must be an integrated approach to handle unemployability in educational institutions. Educational institutions must understand the requirements of the industry. At the same time, the industry must understand the limitations of the educational institutions. As soft skills are directly proportional to employability, there is a need to tune the soft skills training programs as per the needs of the industry, not the other way around.
Both academia and industry cannot operate in different orbits. They have to be within the same orbit, leveraging their strengths to create productive people. People often talk about the interface between academia and industry. However, it should go beyond the interface and reach the point of a marriage between academia and industry to create employable and enlightened professionals.
The faculty must know the needs of the students from time to time and evolve their teaching styles to suit the learning styles of students. This leads to the right chemistry between the faculty and the students. It is not what you know that matters, but what you cater to the students that ultimately matters.
The academia must foresee the needs of the students through thorough research and prepare a flexible curriculum with flexible learning styles to get the desired outcomes.
Team teaching comes in handy to bridge the gap between the campus and the industry. In this method, both the educator and industry expert undertake the teaching session, while the educator emphasizes the theory and the industry expert focuses on the application of the theoretical concepts. It helps students eat the cake and have it too, thus paving the way for relating the real content to real-life events and applications.
Academia is under a theoretical perspective, while the industrial world is under a practical perspective. Both need to communicate, understand, empathize, and appreciate the compulsions and constraints, and work in harmony to produce students who are industry-compatible and employable. It also helps them in personality development and professional growth.
There is a strong need to develop human capital. No country can progress without the growth of human capital. It is always the individual behind the machine that counts, not the machine behind the man. Both management and engineering institutions are the backbone of any country, as they produce managers and engineers and collectively produce technocrats and leaders for industry.
The faculty should develop their soft skills content as they know the real pulse of the students. They should be exposed to corporate establishments to understand and appreciate their needs. This enables them to craft content to suit corporate expectations.
Both faculty and students should be open and receptive to promoting soft skills to survive and succeed in the corporate world. There must be a consensus between both the campus and industry in developing and delivering the content about employability skills. It is necessary to blend both soft and hard skills to produce successful engineers and managers right from educational institutions.
Educational institutions must emphasize experiential learning and blended learning in the classrooms. It is necessary to encourage industry experts to visit educational institutions often to bring awareness among the students about the industry's needs. In addition, finishing schools should be made part of the engineering and management institutions to connect students from the classroom to the corporate world.
Suggestions for faculty
Faculty must provide career counseling and mentoring to the students. They must nurture the talents and skills of students. They must organize soft skills training programs regularly and encourage students to interact with the industry. They must develop strong networking skills through alumni networks. They must conduct mock interviews, group discussions, and presentations regularly. Above all, faculty must teach students how to craft a good resume for a job as well as a resume of failures to help students learn lessons from their mistakes.
Suggestions for industry
Industry must regularly interact with educational institutions to raise awareness among the students about their expectations. It must emphasize employability skills more during induction programs, especially for freshers. Allocate an adequate budget to train and groom them as per industry standards. It must send volunteers to educational institutions to teach employability skills in the classrooms. It should invite faculty from the industry who are passionate about teaching soft skills to their students and training them. Industry (recruiters) will have to do the following to make students plug-and-play employees.
Develop internal training, development, and evaluation programs to ensure current employees are equally well-versed in the same employability skills requested for new hires.
Work closely with and communicate regularly with schools about what employability skills students will need.
Collaborate with schools to provide on-the-job learning experiences through internships and volunteer job opportunities that will assist students in developing employability skills.
Develop consistency in the design and format of job descriptions on a regular, preplanned basis.
The role of finishing schools
Finishing schools play a crucial role in connecting students from the classroom to the corporate world. They are the institutions that bridge the gap between the campus and the industry. Successful students, after their academic education, must undergo extra training sessions in job-related skills and abilities in the finishing school so that they will have a competitive edge and stand out from others. Finishing school is a type of training school that helps equip certain employability skills among the students, especially technical graduates. Finishing schools serve as a platform to polish the rough edges of the unemployable youth. They fill the gaps in academic education and help the students to be industry-ready by equipping the skill set expected by employers. Precisely, they blend both education and experience to enhance employability.
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