High standards of technical education have fueled economic growth on the subcontinent, but too many students still lack vital soft skills
Soft skills are catching up. Long overlooked relative to ‘hard’ technical skills, their importance is becoming clearer – and their absence felt more acutely – in a world in which AI has the potential to take on many more technical tasks.
Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in India. Although Indian students often have superior technical abilities, many lack the interpersonal skills, communication skills and emotional intelligence needed in the modern working environment. Employees have been fired due to a dearth of soft skills. Their absence presents graduates with a significant barrier to gaining employment: lacking the ability to present themselves correctly at interview, they risk missing out on job opportunities. There is more of an unemployability problem than an unemployment problem in India.
Yet most Indian students are ambitious and driven. They emerge from India’s educational institutions as quick learners and thinkers, conceptually agile. Armed with models and numbers, they can diagnose a range of situations through given data. In a nutshell, Indian students are incisive, decisive and inclusive; their technological adaptability is amazing. Yet the failure to give more students opportunities to develop their soft skills has created a major liability for those graduates, who require them to secure employment and achieve career success. It is also, of course, a major problem for employers.
Indian education – challenges and solutions
The world of learning has undergone tremendous changes in India over recent years. Gone are the days when all sectors used to give emphasis to technical skills alone. There has been a welcome change in the mindset of companies. Companies look for the perfect blend of both soft and hard skills among candidates to deliver goods and services effectively to their clients. Yet it is disheartening to see how regularly the Indian education system still leaves young people with an imbalanced skillset.
Solutions lie in a collective response from all the stakeholders involved in young people’s education, including faculty, recruiters, directors of educational institutions, and students themselves. Educational institutions need to develop an integrated approach to handling unemployability, reflecting industry’s requirements. At the same time, industry must understand the limitations of the educational institutions. As soft skills are directly proportional to employability, there is a need to fine-tune the soft skills training programs to the needs of industry, not the other way around.
Academia and industry cannot operate in different orbits. They have to be within the same orbit, leveraging their strengths for creating productive people. People often talk about the interface between academia and industry. However, the relationship should go beyond a mere ‘interface.’ What’s required is a wedding of academia and industry, with the common goal of creating more employable and enlightened professionals.
Every stakeholder group has their part to play. Faculty must have a deep knowledge of students’ needs, and evolve their teaching styles to suit students’ differing learning styles. Creating the right chemistry between faculty and students is key. Ultimately, it is not what you know that matters, but how you cater to students’ needs. To support that, faculty should both develop better soft skills content – and spend time being exposed to corporate establishments, so as to better understand and appreciate their needs. Spending time with business will also enable them to better convey corporate expectations to their students.
To bridge the gap between the campus and industry, more institutions should turn to team teaching, where sessions are delivered jointly by educators and industry experts. It is a natural fit: the educator emphasizes the theory while the industry expert focuses on the application of those theoretical concepts. This plays to each groups’ strengths – academia works from a theoretical perspective, while the industrial world focuses on the practical – and it helps students understand the real-life applications of their technical skills and knowledge. Both sides need to communicate, understand, empathize and appreciate the compulsions and constraints of the other and work in harmony to produce students who are industry-compatible.
Educational institutions must also emphasize experiential and blended learning in the classroom. Encouraging industry experts to visit educational institutions can help students better understand business’s needs. Ultimately, both faculty and students should be open and receptive to promoting soft skills to survive and succeed in the corporate world. A new consensus is needed, across campus and with industry, about the need to work together to develop and deliver content to promote employability. Producing engineers and managers who can succeed from the moment they leave their educational institution is impossible without a better blend of soft and hard skills.
Another element for helping students move from the classroom to the corporate world is the finishing school: a type of training school that helps to equip students – especially technical graduates – with certain employability skills. Having completed their academic education, students undergo extra training sessions in job related skills and abilities. The finishing school serves 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 building the skillset expected by employers.
India’s rapid economic development has been fueled by its success in educating the population and equipping an ever-growing number of students with excellent technical skills. But national success in the decades ahead demands a more integrated and coordinated approach from all stakeholders, to build students’ awareness about soft skills and to enhance their employability.
Professor MS Rao is the founder of MSR Leadership Consultants, India, and the author of 53 books including See the Light in You
