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The primary concern of most businesses is finding the right kinds of minds and training them for the jobs best suited to them. It’s easier to employ people who already know their roles and how to perform them, but fresh minds needs to be trained on the ground, and this is an effort that most companies are more than willing to make, in order to enhance employability skills in an individual. Sadly, for too long now, the Indian education system’s emphasis on memory has overshadowed its requirement for a lucid, responsible education. We start with memorizing multiplication tables, move on to Shakespearean quotes and, by the time we’re done with college, equations are pouring out of our ears without there being a single viable tool to understand, assimilate and use them for innovation and progress. And so it goes: thousands of brilliant students with superlative classroom performance and test scores, and minimal ability to apply the knowledge in real life. Between the thought and the action falls the shadow and the ‘skills gap’ becomes a massive chasm that even the biggest, bravest companies come to fear. The challenges of employability particularly in engineering education warrant the need for a sustainable model to enhance the quality of engineering education in India. The natural response to this requirement would be to directly target students as they are the final beneficiaries, but this isn’t a feasible option. Such an exercise would have to be repeated year after year on each succeeding batch of students, in order to be effective The ideal method of dealing with this issue would be a three-pronged one that involves empowering faculty, developing academic leaders and making use of technology. While empowering each successive batch of students will be a micro-benefit to those specific batches, training the faculty will put the employability tool in the hands of the educator: a far deeper way of engaging with sustainable education ideas. Further training academic leaders to be thought leaders, is another great way of widening the horizon of employability. Natural leaders in institutions as well as workplaces have the ability to influence minds far more easily than voices of authority or formal channels. Finally, in an age where technological progress has made so many things accessible, using technology to spread new notions of employability will nicely bridge the gap between requirement and availability. Together, these three approaches can build local companies and institutions that are on par with the best in the world. Enhancing employability skills involves a paradigm shift in the teaching-learning process. It involves enabling the faculty of institutions to evolve from merely being able to bestow knowledge to becoming facilitators of learning. However, it’s true that you can only take the horse to the water; you can’t make it drink. The change will take place only when the custodians of knowledge – the teachers – recognize and choose to embrace a new perspective of teaching to enable thought rather than teaching to meet the theoretical end of academic accomplishment. Get more information on: Employability Skills & Corporate Sustainability
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