The Placement Game

The Placement Game

 

21/8/13

 

Institutions of higher education have morphed into employment training and placement organizations from being centers of knowledge creation and professional training.  Although this change in expectation has come about without much warning, the transition has not been smooth and satisfactory. There has always been dissatisfaction from the employers about the adequacy of the preparation of the candidates for the job market, and many solutions have mushroomed – such as finishing schools, apprenticeship training programs, etc.

 

There is an interesting conflict between the capability and process.  The teaching and  training and the selection process attempt at obtaining homogeneity while uniqueness is the strength of human endeavor.  The capabilities, the orientation, the capacity, the competence of all individuals are unique, but all the inputs are attempting to erase this uniqueness and replace it with uniform capabilities.  Fortunately, this process is inefficient and fails to achieve uniformity with different levels of success.

 

Industrial revolution has shaped the thinking of industry to seek homogeneity.  As it is said, an employer always prefers a pair of hands, but unfortunately the pair also comes with one head.  Hence it is preferred that the head does not contribute in its own way.  Thus, the many selection processes involve selecting heads which perform task in a certain way.  This kind of selection is easier to score than to determine ways by which an individual does not perform a given task.  Thus, you are looking for people who might answer a silly question (euphemistically called ‘aptitude test’) in a certain way, rather than asking why to answer this question.  When you select candidates in large numbers, you go for homogeneity, while selecting in small numbers, uniqueness should be the key selection factor.  This process itself drives thinking to conform to some arbitrary expectations, while as an individual you are hard wired to be different from the rest of the crowd.  This is an important conundrum, which is a big cause for dissatisfaction in manpower training.

 

The other phenomenon gaining popularity is the publicity given to unusual cases.  Many institutions advertise their placement statistics through official (e.g. brochures) and unofficial (paid news) channels.  Also, the news media look at this as a service to public, for some inexplicable reason – i.e., publicizing the rare cases of exceptional job offers.  The employers want to cash in on this publicity bandwagon by competing with their business peers to outbid the pay package value for the rare cases.  What is not often clear in these communications are the answers to questions such as – the difference between placements, jobs, employment, and career; the contribution of such candidates who make it to the evening news in the long term, say in five years; how the company has performed year on year vis-à-vis their campus recruitment, etc.  You don’t normally see stable companies – those who have had long track record of good performance in such publicity grabbing gimmick. Companies in the service sector such as consultancy are the ones to engage in this perhaps to attract the attention of prospective clientele.

 

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i-jargon

i-jargon

 

20/8/13

 

The prefix of ‘i’ has captured the imagination of people ever since Apple introduced the i-pod, do you think?  Apple itself followed this with many products with an i-prefix, and this trend has been copied by many others.  Apple, which is usually very savvy about protecting its intellectual rights, did not attempt to get the use of the i-prefix protected through trademark or copyright or any such thing for some reason.  

 

Many organizations, have been arranging events to showcase ideas and the related products from them – innovations and inventions, and also the administrative structures created to organize, popularize, protect, and commercialize those emanating from ideas.  (The prefix ‘i’ of the first paragraph relates to internet, but the use of ‘i’, broadly relates to ideas and other terms starting with the letter, and this could be quite confusing.)  How can we celebrate ideas? Many models have been tried –  by putting them on the spotlight; by awarding them prizes; by protecting them from misuse (and use); by selling them off to the highest bidder; by copying them widely through a gadget / process / formulation. Although this is an interesting philosophical debate, many try to argue that the last of the above list is the most profitable way to the individual involved in the creation of the idea, and to society at large.  It is often said that although Indians are considered smart by the rest of the world (and certainly by Indians), there is little tangible proof for this in the form of new ideas leading to products, services or technologies in line with the size of the population or the size of the claims.  I will counter this by saying that Indians are very good when it comes to solutions and designs (and not ideas and products) involving individual applications, like farming practice, using irrigated water, communication with minimal contact, etc.

 

When it comes to transforming ideas into profits many more i’s are required which don’t get the necessary attention for this transformation to take place.  Besides inventions and innovations you also require involvement and integration, inducement and improvisation, investment and integrity.   And in this lies the challenge for the Indian innovator to make a global impact.