NASSCOM McKinsey say 75% engineering graduates are unemployable. You come across Computer Science graduates who wouldn’t be able to name more than one operating system. You have engineering graduates armed with advanced diplomas in C++ unable to write a half decent program. Not just that, the management, principals, directors and faculty members of several engineering colleges prophetically proclaim, “aadhe bachchon ka to bhagwan bhi bhala nahin kar sakta”.

It’s not that the powers that be do not realize the problem. You have a plethora of experts proclaiming unemployability to be a bigger problem than unemployment. You have the Central government rolling out a massive skill development program. The irony of it all is that the engineering and management colleges supposed to churn out professionals are actually getting reduced to degree vending machines producing largely good for nothing engineers.

The malaise is deep rooted. The government having pulled out of higher education, the doors are wide ajar for private players. Too many people having too little to do with education are now owners of engineering and management colleges. You have brick kiln owners, thekedars, zamindars, netas and all and sundry owning professional colleges. Not that I have anything against vernacular businessmen and strongmen, bahubalis, owning colleges – just that the dedication to academic pursuits falls by the wayside when the only obsession is to recover the investments made and create a cash generating machine for generations to come.

The quality of faculty, the quality of management get superseded by the considerations of how can the AICTE requirements be met at minimum cost.

The arrangement works for everybody. People in power understand the trend that BTech is going to be the next BA/BSc. Only the guys who absolutely cannot afford to pay the fee of technical universities even through loans or stretching their finances will be the ones settling for less than a BTech. The demand is going to explode. All you need is a couple of colleges and the financial security of your kin is secured for the next 100 years.

Unless something gives or unless something earth shattering happens, we are staring at no less than a crisis where we churn out maximum number of engineers and managers who could only be employed as glorified clerks.

The problem of unemployability is far more severe than we currently assume. The only hope is for the customers, the students and parents, to wake up to this reality and start demanding more usable curriculum and opportunities for professional development. The closer we inch towards total capitalism, the more active, we’ll need the customer to be.

I have a gripe with the way entrepreneurship is generally talked about or even taught.

Most of the aura associated with entrepreneurship kind of suggests that it is the ultimate professional nirvana and the path which everyone worth his salt must tread.

The truth couldn’t be farther.

Entrepreneurship is not for everybody despite what numerous B-school professors or entrepreneurship experts might have to say and this is irrespective of the eventual outcome of the “entrepreneurs born or made?” debate.

The truth is its like any other professional choice you make. It requires different kinds of skills and attitude and temperament, is exciting like hell for some and can be equally depressing for others. Bungee jumping may be exciting, sexy and adventurous but is not so for all. Now, even if the bungee jump example is over-glorification of entrepreneurship, not liking bungee jumping doesn’t make one a “lesser man”. I, for one, am too scared to bungee jump.

A more pertinent question may be, if it is for me. Again, no decision tree algorithm exists which can help you figure that out. For most of the entrepreneurs, it is some mysterious voice in their stomachs which keeps telling them, “You HAVE to do it”. This is distinctly different from the moments of frustration and anger with your boss or your company which may happen to most of us some time or the other. Deciding to be an entrepreneur becaue your job/boss/company sucks is bad decision making.

This voice of the gut is so persistent, it gradually starts consuming you with drums beating all around your head. This persistent crescendo from within you brings you to a situation when you tell yourself that even if you were all alone, stripped of all the good things you cherish, you’d still do it. In this somehwhat metaphysical sense, entrepreneurship no longer remains a choice.

What all these entrepreneurship courses/trainers/professors could do then is to encourage students to listen to their inner voices and know themselves more. What makes them happy, what gets them excited, what gets them depressed. Self discovery should probably be the first chapter in any book which wants to tell the truth about entrepreneurship.

The steps, structure, financing, strategy, marketing – are the details. Once the inner game is set right, all else follows (yes, that’s the truth no matter how philosophical it may sound; entrepreneurship, in that sense, can have highly philosophical overtones).

And this is where I agree the most with Sunil Handa’s Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation (LeM) course at IIM Ahmedabad. He doesn’t talk about financing, strategy, recruitment, the works. He tries to get the inner game right.

In that sense, the guys who did the course were lucky. It helped identify the inner voices and convinced a lot of us that following the gut was in no way less scientific or more superstitious than following an enormously involved decision making algorithm.

The directive for the curious, then, should be that if you do not hear that crescendo in your head day in and day out, the pesky little voice screaming, “Why the hell did you not get started already?”, either the time is not right or you’d be happier not doing it.

For a first generation, first timer, the reasons have to be all internal. Unless and until internal reasons gather enough steam to become unbearable, don’t do it.

(An older post, here only because of contextual relevance)

The basic pedagogical process can be defined as a systematic transfer of knowledge and – or skills from an instructor to a learner. Depending upon the basic objectives of the process, the transfer may be limited to cognition of facts or may be extended to application and extension of facts, their inter-linkages and derivative concepts.

Since the important players in this interaction are the instructor and the learner, the important determinants of the effectiveness of the process should include the instructor centric parameters, the learner centric parameters and the transaction centric parameters.

Instructor Centric Parameters

Instructor centric parameters revolve around the instructor’s ability to effectively transfer the skills / knowledge and ignite the curiosity and motivation of the learner to explore the area through active thinking and alternative knowledge sources.

• Level of the target knowledge / skill with the instructor
• Level of transaction skill of the instructor
• Ability to engage
• Ability to motivate
• Ability to transfer the knowledge / skill
• Ability to activate the curiosity of the learner
• Ability to answer related questions
• Ability to positively handle unrelated queriesMotivation level of the instructor

The level of target knowledge is to a great extent determined by academic achievements of the instructor. To ensure adequate target knowledge, it is important to not only go by the academic qualifications possessed by the instructor but also testing his actual level of knowledge through independent testing.

Transaction skills of the instructor depend upon the awareness of the learning process possessed by the instructor and his aptitude for teaching. A University degree in education provides adequate understanding of the learning process to the instructor. However, it is important to actually test the teaching aptitude of the instructor.

Motivation level of the instructor determines his level of proactive effort in ensuring effective learning. This depends upon the career goals of the instructor, his basic personality and behavioral traits. It is important to ensure that a sound synchrony exists between career objectives and opportunity and progression, the teaching profession provides.

Learner Centric Parameters

Learner centric factors determine the learner’s ability to grasp the target knowledge set in isolation as well as in the context of related concepts. This includes:

• Level of the pre-requisite knowledge and skills
• Level of inherent aptitude for the specific knowledge set
• Level of inquisitiveness
• Ability to process, analyze and link new information with what already possessed

Together, these factors determine the learning speed.

Actually, the India bit is a tad unnecessary. Test prep for a global test like GMAT has to be the same, Timbuktoo or Tinsukia.

Coming back to the question, what’s the best way to prepare yourself for the desired high score (cliched, I know – no one wants a low score !!!) in GMAT. For that matter, what is the best way to teach yourself anything new be it horse riding, bodybuilding, a new language or even how to write a blog. Simple, go to someone who is an expert and ask him to be your guiding angel for a while.  Imagine learning bicep-building from Arnold or business building from Bill Gates or Larry Page or Richard Branson, imagine learning basketball from Michael Jordan or acting from Al Pacino.

Yes, it’s not going to happen, not at least to the mere mortals unless you happen to be born into one of these families and, then by some strange coincidence, you too take a liking to the same field of endeavor.

Let’s now come back to the relatively less ambitious task of scoring a perfect 800 in GMAT. The best bet would be to catch hold of a guy who is an expert; pray, cajole or somehow convince him to be your guiding angel (try, for instance, making him an offer he can’t refuse !!!) and then follow exactly as he says.

The idea is to seek guidance from an expert who also has the time and inclination to help you understand your own unique combination of skills and attitudes which make you pre-disposed towards a certain score and helps you work on those improvement areas, again unique to you, which can result in the maximum improvement in the score with minimum time and effort investments.

As long as the Perfect Test Prep engine (as discussed in the previous posts) does not attain a high level of maturity, plain old guru-disciple model is the best bet.

Yes, find yourself a personal guru.

If you cannot, do something that approximates the classical guru-disciple dynamics as closely as possible.

Let’s do a quick recap – map out the skills/knowledge attributes tested in the ACT/SAT, determine what proficiency levels lead to what scores, determine what interventions are most effective for a given skill gap in a given attribute, determine the student’s target score, determine his current proficiency levels in all the attributes, determine target proficiency levels (derived from target scores), determine the skill gap and finally determine the required interventions.

A caveat, however, is that this process will not be completely analytical and mathematically deterministic. A lot of “understanding” of the the student’s learning style, goals and objectives and personality will come in play and hence the role of “academic thinking” cannot be neglected in the favor of pure analysis.

After the intervention steps are determined and the delivery of the same starts, it is very important to periodically gauge the effectiveness of each of them and the actual improvement that is happening. The findings will help in mid way course correction, if required, as well as help in making the complete mapping process more robust. In a sense, this engine will be a dynamic set of activities which will “learn” from itself as it is applied to more and more students.

Thus, the perfect test prep engine has to be a dynamic combination of cold analysis, warm understanding and an ability of the engine itself to imbibe learnings from its experiences and make itself stronger in terms of determining the right set of interventions which will lead to the desired score improvement with minimum expenditure in terms of time, money and teacher/student effort.

This engine is, as of today, a theoretical concept – but it is doable. the benefits are so immense it justifies investment in such an idea. It is powerful as it combines the best in analytics with the human side of teaching and makes the system self-improving.

Concluded.