Stay Curious, Stay Employed
Dr. Subramani Ramakrishnan
Vice President, UPS India Technology Center, Author
65% of IT employees not re-trainable. I received this article in many of my WhatsApp groups and many more of my friends shared this widely on facebook.
Some key statements in the article
- 60-65% of the current IT workforce are just not trainable. India will witness the largest unemployment in the middle level to senior level
- NASSCOM says there is a need to re-train upto 1.5 million, or nearly half of its sectoral workforce
- Students are hired from lower grade engineering colleges, to keep entry level salaries low. Against a fresher salary of Rs.2.25 lakhs per annum two decades ago, it has risen to Rs.3.5 lakhs now, which suggests a massive decrease in real wages from an inflation-adjusted perspective.
The above statements in the backdrop of McKinsey's report at NASSCOM India Leadership Forum, that nearly half of the workforce in IT services firms will be "irrelevant" over the next 3-4 years, assumes greater significance.
Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 Report makes some interesting observations on corporate learning
- 84% of executives rated learning as important or very important
- 43% of companies feel comfortable incorporating massive open online courses (MOOCs) into their learning platforms (up from 30% previous year)
- Even as spending on learning rose 10 percent last year (to over $140 billion), only 37 percent of companies believe their programs are effective, and only 30 percent believe corporate learning is the center of learning today.
While the numbers can be debated, the magnitude of this problem is huge. Everyone seems to acknowledge the problem, and everyone is trying to address this. So what is missing?
In my view, the key ingredient missing is CURIOSITY
According to Henry James, our intellectual zeal ebbs as we become adults. The decline in curiosity can be traced to development of the brain through childhood. The infant brain contains millions of more neural connections than the adult brain. However, the wiring is a mess; hence the infant’s perception of world is both rich and disordered. As children grow and learn, the neural connections get hardened into knowledge and beliefs, and the neural pathways that enable those beliefs become faster and automatic.
Curiosity waning in adults is not necessarily a bad thing, and if some of those neural pathways were not automatic, we would have been hostage to every passing stimulus and would be helpless.
This is where distinction needs to be drawn between exploring for new knowledge vs. exploiting the acquired knowledge. As children, we were busy exploring new knowledge, but as we grow into adults we do more of exploiting the knowledge we acquired when we were young. And we stop exploring new knowledge.
A few days back, came across this great TED Talk by John Cohn, an IBM Fellow in the IBM Watson Internet of Things Division. Maybe his idea of Importance of Play @ Work has some practical tips to kindle the curiosity back in adults.
In an industry where half-life of knowledge is a few years, the onus is clearly on us, the employees to STAY CURRENT, STAY RELEVANT with the advancements in our area of work and for that we need to STAY CURIOUS.
So my response to my friends was STAY CURIOUS, STAY EMPLOYED…
Would like to hear from you
General Partner at Sirius One Capital
7 年Spot on. Buffett says the best investment you can make is in yourself. Survival - both at an individual as well as a corporate level - will drive this trend. However Corporates will focus more on training their top talent. Individuals have no choice. Pretty similar to financial SIPs, individuals will need to invest in knowledge SIPs right through their working lives - you are by yourself mate! Keep investing in yourself and keep your options open. Curiosity can help steer these investment choices but needs to be at the intersection of where future opportunities lie.
true, Nothing can ever be achieved without enthusiasm.
Apply human learning & empathy to understand problems & build solution
7 年On dot & right timing! While there are talks on competing with machine and global basic income, am worried if our education system is creating more of modern slaves whose key skill is to follow the instruction. To extend further, with lack of curiosity human learning will follow machine learning and future generations will be learning like machines!!
Enterprise Data Storage Server Software / Hardware Tester for distributed systems
7 年Leave your thoughts here…I see the desire of older IT workers wanting to learn new things but the lesser wages, longer workdays tend to put the curiosity(education) factor on the back burner to get ones work/life balance struggle at the right place.
Founder & President at Breathe Water, LLC
7 年Great points, Subbu. Your article is actually a great example of what we can do at any age, which is to connect the things we know in new and transformative ways. Thanks for sharing this information.