During my 32 years of association with the corporate world, I have had worked with different categories of people and eventually I graduated myself in the field of business management. Of course it’s an insightful and intelligent journey. I have many reasons to believe and claim this to your fullest satisfaction. You may wonder how it is intelligent journey. To understand this, first you need to understand how domestic & international economy operates, how industry reacts to the changes in global economies, how job market gets influenced and hence, social generation gap. In several years of my career, I realized and experienced changes amongst different generations. Earlier, it was said that in every 10 years, one generation gets changed. However, in recent past I felt same changes in every 3 years of different age brackets. For our easy understanding, I will call it as an “Impact of Socio – Economic changes” of Indian industry.
Let’s understand how this works? Post independence era, the foremost priority of most of us was to earn livelihood for family. At that time, probably people were not so keen about career or better life style and majority of us were much contended. This continued till late 80’s, and suddenly we caught up with the wave of globalization. It started with revolution in telecom sector and later in many other sectors like, automobile, IT, entertainment, power, electronics, lately, in BFSI and now retail is knocking the doors. During this past 30 years, our economy has shifted from agricultural to industry dominated economy. As a result, global economies have started eying on us as most potential economy and today we have every single MNC in our country. They became growth engines and brought many benefits with pocketful disadvantages for us. Having mentioned this, I never advocate against globalization, however, it is equally important for us to drive further with the advantages without getting caught up with disadvantages. This has led changes in human behavior and suddenly we became more impulsive towards our life and career.
It is evident that different priorities have produced different significance and as a result, we experienced shift in human psychology towards their education, career and life at large. In nearly 30 years, priorities in life have shifted from merely survival to glorified lifestyle. Now we have different reasons to earn, different perspective towards our career and so as for our education. I remember education pattern implemented during “Augmentation Age”, which was more subjective than objective. Earlier, education pattern was more “Knowledge” oriented than “Examination” oriented. The education pattern has shifted from “Knowledge Orientation” to “Examination Orientation”, made us more hollow about what we learn. Now days, we became more concave towards our need for learning and hence developed habit to learn subjects and not the substance. This is because of rising need for more and more learned people to fill employment gaps. Educational institutions are producing more and more graduates than scholars and experts. As I mentioned earlier, country like India, where conducive environment for business available, overall industry is growing and hence more MNCs are now available with numerous career opportunities for most of us. We became more impulsive towards our career because of gap in demand and supply of talent. Earlier working and growing in one organization for long period, was considered as grand testimony. While in current scenario, rather than working with one organization for growth, people change organization for growth. They serve many organizations in few years than working for few organizations in many years of career. But question is, are they ready for growth? Are they employable? In our country, employability gap is wider than employment gap. I personally believe that employment gap is largely contributed by employability gap and not by political or economic situations. We have plentiful opportunities today, but essentially not ready to grab them. How can we say that country like India, which is one of most growing economy in the world, does not produce enough employment opportunities?
Employability Skills Chart
It is more of WILL issue than SKILL issue. Skill issues can be addressed only if Will is in place. The necessary element is to carry positive attitude to prepare ourselves for current as well as future skills requirement. Now a day many institutions have revamped their educational curriculum keeping employability gap in mind. However, it will not be sufficient to develop employable communities. To reduce gap, we need to deal with psychological attribute which eventually gets influenced by social, economic and educational factors. It will be an individual efforts turns into group initiative with global mindset. It is more of “Can I” than “Do We” kind of feeling. If I want to be employable, then I need to put extra efforts, I need to take extra pain. If I can’t, then it seems that I am seeking divorce with my career.
-Makarand Bhatt
