Yesterday I came face to face with reality. My erstwhile man-friday of over twenty odd years, a person who I respected highly as he had brought me up as a child, came to visit me with his daughter in tow.

I had no inkling that his seemingly innocuous request to me was going to be one of the most difficult ones to actually service. “Saheb, can you get my daughter a job? She has just completed her graduation and is on the lookout for one”, he pushed his daughter’s CV into my hands and expectantly looked towards me for help. One look at her CV and I knew that it was an impossible task. A bachelor of arts from a non-descript university, no work experience and English skills below average at best, she had more of a chance winning an election rather than getting a job. However, this was one task I could not shirk away from and immediately volunteered that she join my office. To my surprise, he refused this offer and his self respect shone through the reason, as he put it to me, “she should get through on her own merit, not on your largesse”.

His reason was a valid one and he had a lifetime of sacrifice invested in her education. However, emotions alone do not suffice in this hugely unforgiving world of ours and I found myself helpless before his eyes. I could not explain to him why the CEO of the largest executive search firm in India was unable to find a job for his daughter. As I watched him leave crestfallen and with a feeling of betrayal writ large upon his face, my heart went out to him and I found the rage rising within me at the unfairness of it all. Sixteen years of education getting a bachelor’s degree and still unemployed? What kind of country were we living in anyway? What education are we imparting to our youngsters? These questions gnawed at me and begged to be answered.

The toughest question a fresher normally faces in an interview is – ‘Do you have any work experience?’ From the employer’s point of view, this is an important question, as work experience or the lack of it will determine whether the person is employable. However, for the candidate this question eclipses more than 16 years of sweat and hardship that went into earning title of a graduate - the minimum qualification for getting a job. The truth is that graduates produced by the Indian education system are not employable. They do not have the requisite skill sets to get jobs that match their academic degrees.

It is observed that candidates are usually literate and possess all the theoretical and superficial knowledge in the form of university degrees and diplomas and in that sense they meet the minimum educational criteria set by the potential employers. Unfortunately, the education system does not equip them with any practical knowledge about their desired job profile. A classic case that comes to mind is about one of my co-workers, who vehemently insists that on graduating from an engineering college armed with a degree in computer science, he had never even been called upon to assemble a computer. He knew all the hardware components and the theory behind them but had never ever set eyes on what they looked like. Another that I recall with much amusement is how I quizzed an MBA Finance on the Union Budget and when I asked him about the Finance Bill, he showed remarkable presence of mind by informing me that it was presented by the Finance Minister to the PM for payment as it was the expenditure incurred on preparing the budget.

This is when the difference between employment and employability becomes important. Being employed means having a job, which is a temporary condition. Being employable means possessing qualities needed to maintain employment and progress in the workplace. Employability of a person is directly proportional to the amount of time gainfully spent in an organization. The BPO industry is an example of how freshers and even undergraduates are poached by rivals or other industries as soon as they learn the tricks of the trade. A year or two in the outsourcing industry and the candidate is ‘employable’ enough to be picked up by any vertical in the service industry at a higher salary and better growth prospects.

At a broad level, employability depends on the interplay between assets like knowledge and skill set, usage and deployment of these assets and the presentation of these assets to the employer. Since our education system does develop these capabilities, all graduates entering the job market, with 16 or more years of academic knowledge, need to relearn and reskill themselves.

This need, for re-skilling, has been addressed but in a very fragmented manner. It started with the information technology sector that recognized this lacuna in the system. Institutes like NIIT and Aptech stepped in to fill the gap between what the employer wanted and what the system churned out. The result was that the subject in which the candidate graduated did not matter, what mattered was the practical knowledge of computers – hardware and software that the candidate had and some soft skills.

Later on other privately run institutes like NIS and the Indian Retail School sprung up to cater to their respective industries. Of course there are some things which can be learnt by experience alone. That is the reason why recruiters sift through thousands of CVs for an entry level position, but when it comes to a senior management requiring 20-25 years of work experience it is a toss-up between 2 or if you are lucky 5 CVs. There is need for a systemic change so that every youth, who graduates, is not afraid to answer the question – ‘do you have any work experience?’. This debate rages on and may I add will rage on endlessly, however, the only unchanging thing in our system which has endured for centuries is the tradition of ‘sifarish’ or recommendation and as I hasten to pick up the phone to assuage the feelings of an aggrieved father by recommending his daughter for a job, I cannot help but think that “this is no solution”. Is anyone listening out there?