While the economy is booming, and the class of 2018 has it better off than its millennial predecessors, the entrepreneurship rate is still sputtering. Combining Labor and Education could help influence colleges to add broad entrepreneurship requirements, which are needed for all students in today’s economy where creative destruction is seemingly upending every profession.
According to Ruchir Arora, CEO and Co-Founder, CollegeDekho, “India is a highly populated country, where we all are successful in producing numerous engineers, CAs, MBAs, etc. but are failing to understand that the industry is unable to absorb these many people every year. Along with GD Goenka, our endeavour is to provide a skill set which is required for the current and relevant industry to ensure employment for the students once they pass out.”
The education industry is booming, especially in India, where the emphasis is on providing quality education right from the primary level up to the higher education level. The central and state governments along with the HRD Ministry are taking steps to ensure inclusive education by various means. With so many schools and colleges coming up, the demand for professionals who can understand the system, market it, manage resources and effectively contribute towards its upliftment has gone up and the trend is expected to continue.
According to Dr. Githa Hegde, Director, IFIM Business School, “These are crucial times for the generation which is preparing to make major decisions for a sustainable future. Our role as an educational institution is not only to train them academically, but nurture their creativity and help them shape their ideas better. The employment industry is ever evolving, hence, students must have the skills and experiences that equip themselves to adapt and bring about better innovations. The eligibility criteria for jobs will eventually evolve and our responsibility, here, is to build a strong base for students to make them continuously employable.”
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, founder, Biocon, feels, we are witnessing the birth of technologies that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.
“The scale, scope, and complexity of the transformation are unlikely to be like anything humankind has experienced before. Failure is inherent to building success and students must be coached on managing risk and failure. Skills acquired by the youth will be a defining factor in building a strong future for the country. In my life’s journey, my ability to face and learn from failure helped me a great deal. When I started off as a 25-year-old woman entrepreneur with no business experience and limited financial resources, I had to face huge credibility and perception challenges, as well as, failures,” she added.
By turning an entrepreneur, Mazumdar Shaw has been able to create nearly 10,000 direct jobs and several thousands of indirect jobs in lieu of the one job that she was seeking!
“Today, India needs all of us – especially capable young people like you – to be responsible and address the myriad challenges our country faces: food security, health security, job security, energy security and environmental sustainability. Remember, our country cannot aspire to economic greatness as long as India remains home to one-fourth of the world’s poor and more than one-third of all malnourished children. So I would like to ask you to get involved and convert these challenges into opportunities that can help bring about transformational change in alleviating human suffering while creating wealth and prosperity for all,” she shared.
With the education industry growing by leaps and bounds in the last decade, the demand for skilled educated and innovative people catering to the management and operations in the education field is on the rise. Education institutions should plan to go a step ahead in the direction of empowering students enough to excel not just academically but also be employment ready, equipped with the appropriate skill set.