The existing Skill Gap and the looming uncertainty of Skills required

Lets expect more - If we aim for the stars we will reach the moon

We were already in a crisis in education before the COVID19 and I am at a complete loss to find a term to describe whats happening in education today and crisis does not even come close to explaining it.

We were in a crisis earlier because while students need a different set of skills to survive in today's knowledge economy, and one was not even certain of what skills are required to be relevant in the future workforce, our national ambition around which we were and are rallying is to provide our students just the basic numeracy and literacy skills and we were failing at that too. And then COVID19 struck.

I am not saying that we should not drive these basic numeracy and literacy skills - these are needed but can we aim higher today. Basic Numeracy and Literacy or what can be explained as Reading, Writing, and a basic understanding of Mathematics are now hygiene. I do not remember hiring anybody - not even my school dropout office boy for just these. I looked for more

Most of us look for much more in the people we hire at even the lowest levels. Here are a few that I look for

Foundation Skills which for me means the ability of an individual to know how to learn new things and apply what has been learnt to improve their productivity and deliverables

I find communication skills - the basic ability to listen, comprehend and convey clearly in whatever language - extremely important. I struggle with finding people who can understand simple instructions and do what they have been instructed to.

The ability to think on their feet and be adaptable. The simple creative thinking and problem solving ability that one must possess to do simple daily tasks.

Its rare to find people who are effective in groups and possess interpersonal skills, negotiation skills and teamworks. Our school system rewards individual performance and the single minded pursuit of more assignments, and better grades keeps our children away from the play ground where many of these skills get built. However these skills are extremely important to succeed.

It even rarer to find people who possess leadership abilities and who can help drive organisational effectiveness and I do not mean the one required to run an IBM successfully but the one required in their individual contexts. As a nation we do not have a large set of people with great attitude, personal management skills, and the ability to apply or extend our existing knowledge especially under stress.

And these skills are not necessarily what is required in the highest paying jobs or enter the best colleges in the country, these skills are require for jobs students hope to get in this knowledge economy even when they drop out of high school and remain resilient in crises like the one we are experience. All students will need these skills to earn more than the minimum wage. The real problem is that we are not even aiming to provide all students with these new skills today or in the next decade.Each of these skills need to be crafted and built from grounds up by educators who will need to be trained for the job. Our teachers do a great job at what they are asked to do and what they were trained to do. The question is when will we start to realise that we are a couple of decades behind and enable them to do what is needed - rather than continue to ask them to deliver what was hygiene a decade ago.

Lets expect more - If we aim for the stars we will reach the moon