Challenge for grooming Future Leaders

Dr. Asoke K. Laha
Chairman-Emeritus and Founder
InterraIT

Few months ago, I received a troll from a friend of mine; a hilarious one to listen to. The setting was an event in an engineering college and the presenter was a young lanky student, who can be spotted in any of the engineering colleges across the country and beyond. He was presenting a skit, where the central character was an engineering student. When he was an aspiring student of engineering, everyone was asking what all colleges and institutes that he would apply to and what branch of engineering he would opt for. When he told them that he would apply for textile engineering, where he thought he could contribute more, his peers and parents alike told him that it would be a dumb choice since it would not take him anywhere. Prompted by their advice, when he decided that he would choose computer science, the question was which engineering college he would get enrolled in.

Finally, when he got enrolled into an IIT of repute and went through the rigor of a five-year course, at the penultimate year, he underwent the harrowing experience of campus rejection and selection and finally landed up a reasonably paying job being offered by a multinational company.  His peers asked what the nature of his job would be. When he revealed that it was coding, he was rebuked by all as to them,  it was something that can be handled by a matriculate with common sense and gifted by a sense of logic.  He rejected that offer to knock at another door during the campus selection to get another offer from a multinational bank, which offered him better money. Having taken pride in that offer, he was asked by friends the nature of jobs, he had to tell  them that it was mostly to do with spreadsheets and mundane calculations, projections and such peripheral jobs, the peer group started mocking him as a potential clerk.

That forced him to reject that job out rightly to seek a job in a tier two company with good salary, perks  and attractive designation as a strategic advisor or something of that sort. By then  he had grown wary of the campus selection and decided to cling on to the job whatever it could be. He finally did so. But nagging inquiries did not stop there. His parents and circle of friends started asking him when he would become an onsite employee, meaning when he would finally settle in the USA or any other country.

This could be a troll, and one should not infer  too much from that. But I am sure, this is a typical situation many of the young and aspiring engineering graduates are undergoing. Are they being taught engineering? Is the aim of  a student and  disciplines and colleges that he can get enrolled, purely depends on his intelligent quotient and analytical powers? One need not be an educationist or a technocrat to understand the flaws of the system fraught with gaps and deviations. Should we follow an elite system in education that begets elite streams, disciplines, institutions and the like? Do we have to study in Harvard Business School to become the best entrepreneur, who can create wealth?  Conversely, how many bright graduates passed out from the Harvard Business School have become billionaires?

But I always feel that faith in oneself and the hunger are  the greatest assets.  Let me dwell on that concept a little further. Why should one feel that he or she is inferior to any other person since he /she did not have the opportunity to study in an ivy league or could not bag the first or second  rank or a first division in the academic grading. Life does not come to an end with your academic pursuit or by bagging a cushy job. I have written in one of my earlier columns here that we must discontinue with the tendency to eulogize the offers made at the campus selections. But one thing I am happy that the cacophony of campus selection and huge displays in the media  on the offers and perks have disappeared, at least in the  premier institutions. Instead, they should find out how many students are happy and contented with the offers they have got and how they would be chalking out their career path in the given organization or any other organizations. Let  them also bring to the fore as to how many of the passed-out students have opted for setting up a startup or pursuing a line of business of his/her  choice. I am not talking about progenies of businessmen and industrialists who will be stepping into their family business but those who are iconoclasts to consciously refuse a well-paying job to start something of their own. I sincerely feel that more the number of such people the better for the nation since they are the potential wealth creators.

Does it mean that we must have a different approach while calibrating policies towards grooming up talents? I feel the sooner we do that the better. Otherwise, we may have to find recourse to number crunching while talking about creation of employment.   We also talked about skilling people to provide the right type of people to the industry, which is  constantly complaining  that they are not getting the right type of people to be employed. I may venture to point out that this approach is like distancing from reality. No educational institution can train students to suit job specifications of a particular industry or group of industries. It is for the industry to train them to mold them to their needs.

Friends, managing and grooming talents not alone for the present but for the future is a difficult task.  Human resources should not be treated like  other factors of production  such as land, technology and organization.  In the challenging times ahead with the type of demographic pull that we have, we must create ecosystems that address  such eventualities and find solutions to the challenges. For that, the first thing that we should realize is that mere rendition of demographic dividend without matching efforts is only rhetoric.