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.
…..