Right-invest in Education - A Must to Increase Employability

A lot has already been said on the topic of talent and the way different countries look at it. I wish to add my views to this debate especially from an IT industry point of view. Let me start by stating three obvious trends that will drive talent demand.

First – Global IT industry has been a big employer of young talent across the globe because of the increasing influence of IT in business transformation. The global meltdown is being seen as an opportunity to transform by many CEOs across the world and they are looking at IT to lead this transformation.

Second – Technology innovation is driving IT complexity and strict compliance norms & concerns of business continuity is driving a need for repeatable processes and assured performance.

Third - IT has become “glocal”- it has to transcend geographic and demographic barriers to deliver this transformation.

Therefore, when we look at talent hiring, development and deployment on a global scale, we cannot afford to create artificial boundaries that global commerce does not support and at the same time we cannot make the mistake of assuming that talent from a handful of countries can meet the new demands being made on Global IT as being local with the customer is a critical factor that will drive our ability to truly partner with our customers.

That implies that high quality talent needs to be available across the globe that can drive this opportunity. Unfortunately, that is not true. While there are good examples of some countries putting emphasis on changing their education system to make it more business ready or what I call “increasing employability” – in most parts of the world, education and employability are not in step with each other, resulting in significant investment being made by individual companies in training.  The employability challenges are universal. This includes countries like India and China where there isn’t a dearth of education institutions, but “employability” issues persist.  In the US, President Obama had mentioned expanding access to higher education as one of the basic pillars of America rebuilding itself into the superpower status it enjoyed . http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education. 

The four parties who need to play a role in addressing this critical challenge are - the Government, education institutions, the industry, and the students themselves, who need to understand the changing role of IT and the world of right-first-time processes along with innovation to drive effective transformation. None of the four can make this work in isolation - it has to be a well coordinated approach.

Thus the real debate is not about who is smarter or how can we create trade barriers to protect jobs-the real debate is how do we invest in every country and ensure we create rich employable talent that is globally available that will drive efficiency and innovation in our businesses.

We have a very large pool of very talented and educated youth. It is our responsibility to right invest in them.