Education needs to take centre stage again for India to convert its aspiration of global eminence to solid reality. As India stands at the cusp of a new government, or even governments over the next few years, it will have to place education over politics to meet its destiny.
Education Imperative
The journey so far has been slow but steady. It has built components within the education sector over the decades and these in turn have combined to build a steady momentum in boosting our lives and lifestyles. While the country has figured out much in education, much is in progress we can agree. If the goal of investment in the education sector is economic progress, the focus clearly has to be on skills. The Skills Strategy must go beyond the conventional framing of skills and the traditional cast in which strategies and policies are built. At this stage the focus will need to be on upgrading the process of skilling and on prioritizing the three prongs of the Skills Strategy laid out here. Before we do that, the imperative at this stage is to recognise the elements of this momentum and know that we must have a Skills First approach to deliver on it.
The Three Phases of Education Momentum
The momentum that has been built in the past decade and more has come in three phases – recognition, capacity and policy. Recognition of Indian education’s potential began with software and medical professionals contributing not just to the rank and file but also acknowledged as leaders of the largest firms in the world. Capacity building in higher education and in foundational learning has steadily increased the ability to access higher education. Policy reformation has upped the ante by challenging those at the forefront of delivery of education to adapt ahead of need – flexibility, quality and responsiveness in learning – while maintaining the discipline that created the previous momentum.
These three phases are by no means complete. The first has asked the question – can the Indian education system deliver world class leadership? The second begs the question – can this leadership be delivered at scale? Third – can this education system adapt to continue to deliver a continual stream of leadership quality personnel for global needs?
Ambition, Aspiration and Markets
The aspiration of India is global for sure, even as domestic markets remain large, attractive and interesting for both Indian and foreign players. The markets in India feel like a mirage to many, and yet, there is both depth in demand when value is delivered and surprisingly maturity in supply when guided well. In both, the Indian start up system continues to provide the spice to boost the momentum felt even by traditional businesses. This is not without struggle. And one of the key struggles is skills.
While the ambition might be a chain of leaders for global businesses emanating from India, often the ground reality is that the skills gap constrains that path. Not only do factories and offices struggle to fill positions with great staff, students struggle to meet both aspirations and expectations. Skills infrastructure continues to be built, and then struggles to find a market for higher order attainments. This becomes priority one for the near future, lest this gap slows down the energy of the markets.
Three Prongs to the Skills Strategy
Skills themselves need to be focused on three things – Quality, Need and Discovery. Each of these prongs requires different strategies and certainly government and institutional support.
Quality
While quality of skills acquired continues to flourish primarily as apprenticeship within employment, the education system has a role to play here too. This may well come from setting up a network of assessments and certifications that enable youth to prove their value add and upgrade their earning levels. Teaching institutions will always follow any examination as we have seen with the recent example of the CUET (Combined University Entrance Test) – and the decision to allow private participation in learning is only helpful in building scale and success. The testing system however is essential infrastructure that can only be enabled at the central and state government levels and should be co-ordinated.
Need
Need, the second prong of the skills story is an old question but a new priority due to the dramatic shifts in the world of employment. No longer does the need for skills merely ask for something as mundane as 21st century skills or industry ready skills. The need now is for those who can handle chaos, who can build new structures of delivery and those who are not fazed by the reframing of their entire worldview. To be ready for change and navigate it is the new skill. Industry needs such navigators with resilience.
The challenge here is that our youth are struggling, and this is true across nations. The pace of change, the dismal outlook and indeed the inherent hypocrisies of our systems has created a swathe of mental health problems that is felling the best and the brightest, not just the strugglers. The struggle is real in different ways for many of our young and resilience is a far dream for many. To skill up in ways that build mental strength that matches our other potential intelligences is the challenge to the education sector.
The way ahead is not clear even to experts. While schools and higher education institutions continue to build counselling and support infrastructure while also assuring employers of the rigour of their programs, many students wonder at the gap between their lived experience and the expectations. To fill this gap requires upskilling not just for the youth but a lot of growing up for the grown ups in the room who will need to develop their own arsenal of skills to strengthen, sustain and skill youth for the needs ahead.
Discovery
Discovery is the third prong of the skills ask and this might actually be the easiest to solve. For a highly skilled person to prove their skill set and for the market or employer to discover them has become harder than ever before in the face of the mediocrity of examinations and the lack of discovery mechanisms in other areas. This is compounded by an embarrassment of riches in India where great talent is hidden in the sheer numbers of students graduating every year.
To be discovered for one’s specific talents and then to be appropriately skilled requires a great deal of luck in current times. This is in part an inevitable side effect of the demographic dividend, or demographic bulge – whatever you call it. The world of opportunity exists but to be able to access that requires the ability to be discovered and a discovery mechanism. The ability to be discovered is also a skill as many content creators on social media have proved to us. It is now up to the education system to deliver on both aspects – skilling for discovery and building discovery mechanisms.
The old discovery mechanisms of examinations, certificates and courses is not adequate, not in the face of the demand for jobs and the kaleidoscopic nature of the supply of jobs. Building the skills for discovery might be easier by using mentor networks, supporting showcasing grants, enabling various pitching platforms among other things where young people get better and better and their core area and at offering them up for revenue and reward.
The infrastructure required for such discovery mechanisms must constantly evolve and will have to be supported by institutions. The challenge here is that institutions may be great at the static, they are often wary of handling things that evolve and morph under their care. Skilling institutions to handle discovery mechanisms that me deliver a match between talent and market in ways they do not understand is going to be quite tough. It will mean accepting that the ‘authority’ knows less than the market and will also mean they have to cede some control on the outcomes. They may, for example start with a talent hunt for singers and find that the market rewards technologists who are rooted in music theory.
Policy has already directed multidisciplinary approaches to school and higher education – and so this combination is highly likely in the formal system in the near future. However, the first batches of any unlikely combinations require discovery mechanisms to grow their learning and find their market. The skills required to build such forward looking discovery platforms are as essential and require a mindset change in institutions.
There is both good news and bad news for those of us who wish for these skills to be available to all. The good news is that we have done this before. Whether it was the y2k crisis that was met by Indian engineers, or when ICT and Telecoms integrated to be represented by the smartphone in your hand, students and skills have both navigated this journey.
The bad news is that the first took over twenty years to build – the first software engineers in the country were trained in the nineteen seventies. And the second took over ten to fifteen years to be integrated – through the nineties these were seen as separate pathways even as the need for the new was obvious to many. We do not have the luxury of decades now.
The clock ticks faster than every before. And skilling up continues to demand time. Bridging the gap between demand and supply of skills is now in the dimension of time where we must leapfrog in training for futures that we barely can imagine at this stage. This means we will make mistakes along the way, and maybe our greatest skill requirement at this stage is the ability to take such risks.
Reframing Skilling – In Summary
Skilling now must be reframed in three ways – the content of skilling, the process of skilling and the purpose of skilling. The old definitions where we merely paid attention to the content of skilling and built cadres of carpenters and electrical engineers must continue to upgrade to higher quality and value addition. This is our first prong of Quality. We need to also skill up our educators to deliver to meet the skills gap. This requires faster change in processes, more responsive or even adaptive courses in the skilling sector. Skilling at the speed of need – this is our second prong. The third is about purpose – where we recognise the immense talent that needs to be discovered so that the future is designed by us as we see fit. We will need to skill up in ways that meet our current and future purpose. At one level our purpose is as simple as jobs that help everyone recognise their potential and find joy – discovering and matching that to market. At another level it is about discovering the future via the skills of those who build the jobs, institutions and the rules for the decades ahead. None of these skills exist yet, and the starting line for these is now.
(Meeta Sengupta advises on Education and Skills)
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Bonus: For the longer vision decades ahead
What is the worst that can happen, I ask? If we take the risk and develop a range of skilling options in a responsive manner, taking a chance with investments in upskilling – what will happen?
In some areas we will get it right, and we will meet the need for skills with the right quality. We may find ourselves with overskilled people in some arenas. Bring it on, for it is this surplus that will determine better futures. Our choice here is which surplus skillset do we invest in – and I suggest we invest in resilience for the commons. We skill up to enable the greater good with greater granularity. This when parsed to health, to climate, to food, to entertainment and every other sector deliverable will translate to building a future we can enjoy without anxiety. To skill up ahead of AI is to choose a higher trajectory than the transaction machine can even envisage. Let it run the ship as long as we build the skills to be better navigators.
Meeta W Sengupta 