February 18, 2025

The Indian Employability Challenge And An Experiential Learning Solution

10 min read

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Dr Manish Malhotra, Co-Founder and Chairman, Employability.life and Professor Duncan Bentley, Vice-Chancellor and President, Federation University Australia in dialogue with Dr Annurag Batra, Editor-in-Main and Chairman, BW Businessworld

Employability.life is functioning in partnership with Federation University Australia to carry a distinctive programme to India, intended to enhance pupil employability in the electronic age by way of experiential education. By replicating the place of work natural environment and its concentrate on endeavor shipping and delivery, Experiential Microcredentials (XPMCs) blend with a common diploma to maximise outcomes in both of those understanding and employment. Dr Annurag Batra of BW Businessworld sat down with the essential figures in this transformative new solution:

How has your previous expertise aided you in introducing Employability.lifestyle to India?

Manish Malhotra: It all commenced when I commenced this company 20 several years in the past in Australia, the place I concluded my PhD and established up a know-how university in affiliation with, and affiliated with, Federation College Australia. We professional terrific demand from customers for nearly 20 a long time, with above 30,000 Indian college students being taught as a result of our faculties, but in the previous few yrs, we have uncovered that the industry was switching substantially, predominantly mainly because of the new digital economy. Automation in a state like India threatens up to 69 for every cent of upcoming careers, and the obstacle was to deliver this programme to India with the identical good quality as in Australia but at the Indian rate stage, which was not an easy trouble to fix. 

We came up with a product or service termed Experiential Microcredentials (XPMCs), wherever we are providing initiatives that are co-developed with marketplace gurus and bigger schooling institutes, from our Australia and British isles offices. We are embedding this into the Indian ecosystem by educational institutions in this article so that pupils can acquire gain of experiential coaching and have real-existence encounters even right before completing their qualifications. So far we have signed up 68 schools throughout the region, and with any luck , more likely forward. We want to create graduates who are completely ready to get the job done!

What has adjusted in the competencies and employability house due to the Covid-19 pandemic?

Duncan Bentley: In some techniques, Covid-19 acted as a catalyst for us to concentrate on what it usually takes to grow to be component of a a lot a lot more electronic entire world – it was occurring already, but the pandemic was an accelerator.

If you look at any of the significant organisations like BCG, McKinsey, and so on, what they’re on the lookout at is how businesses can cope with the electronic transformation, to be ready to endure in a extremely globally linked environment exactly where the geopolitical environment is starting to be a lot more challenging… How do you locate the techniques that are essential for a twenty-very first-century career?

Just one of the principal troubles is that the tutorial curriculum has for way too extended been driven by classic market place demand with no truly hunting at in which the competencies are going… I can question an app on my phone for practically any knowledge content that I need – for case in point, I experimented with ChatGPT the other working day and it gave me a curriculum for an global tax regulation that coated most of the essential technical content material. What it simply cannot do, nonetheless, is convey in the human dimension of creative imagination, collaboration, cultural being familiar with and dilemma-resolving working with that knowledge.

This is what companies are genuinely inquiring for write-up-pandemic. They want graduates who have these abilities since they do not have the time and means to prepare them for the reason that the financial system is powering away. We have received a talent war and we have acquired to be in a position to provide to the customers now. 

Employability.existence is drawing from what we have created up in Australia about 150 a long time and refined to be ready to produce what employers want in graduates.

How can we improved train delicate skills to students? What function do they have in employability?

DB: We have had a prolonged custom of cooperating with business and bringing them into the style and design, shipping, and coaching of college students. As a cooperative university, each individual one one particular of our college students requires to have the skill to embrace soft techniques, irrespective of their academic self-discipline. ‘Soft skills’ is these types of a nebulous title, it indicates that they are somehow less crucial than some of the other competencies. But in reality, that is the critical human dimension that we provide to any issue.

The notion of creativeness, curiosity and creative imagination is incredibly significant to issue-resolving, as viewed in educational experiments, and it this that we have tried out to distil into the XPMC goods. Pupils can encounter those people features that carry an specialist interpretive framework to any difficulty in which the human dimension sits on major of understanding and technological techniques.

What built Federation College want to lover with Employability.daily life?

DB: Federation College has been performing with Dr Malhotra for decades. We know he is an incredibly insightful entrepreneur and just one of the issues that we have completed collaboratively is to actually push the boundaries of education, discovering and expertise.

Lately, the Indian Minister of Education came to Australia from India and put out a obstacle. When Indian-born migrants are most likely to turn into the prime migrant group in Australia, India demands to have the very same functionality to provide these chances in India. With the forward-contemplating Nationwide Training Plan 2020, we noticed this as an opportunity to get the job done with colleges that are hunting for these solutions as element of their curriculum that will enable their learners to be sought-just after graduates.

Many thanks to our cooperative method we are directly working with business and it has built us number one in employment for undergraduates in Australia. There is a immediate causation amongst doing work in an atmosphere in advance of you graduate and your lifetime-extensive achievement and earnings.

With this new challenge with Employability.daily life, we wished to see if we could offer that gold-conventional worldwide credential that Australian universities have and assistance employability initiatives in India. We are in this article for the extensive time period as we see this as a significant option not just for India but then Asia and the rest of the environment.

 

What products and solutions are you launching and how do you approach to scale these in India?

MM: The first product that we are launching out of Employability.lifestyle is the XPMC, a brief sort for Experiential Microcredential. When we commenced wanting at this difficulty in India, we realised that the gap among training and employability is very significant, it truly is substantial. Now a ton of Indian institutions – engineering faculties, MBA educational facilities – are making an attempt to dissolve that, but in all fairness, specific operate is not more than enough. We did a convention past 12 months and we invited a large amount of leaders across India to chat about this challenge, and we realised that there wants to be a answer which is typical to all schools and that can be designed to replicate and scale in India.

These experiential ordeals are a few-month jobs that we have labored on with marketplace to generate a simulated function surroundings that can be easily offered within the current instruction ecosystem in India. The colleges we have signed up with are a mix of engineering, B-Tech and MBA institutes. We have now established these projects for experiential studying alongside them.

We are aiming for distinct concentrations of experiences that will get students started as soon as they start off college. So the initiatives will be ongoing along with the degree programmes. This provides a simulated perform surroundings and serious practical experience of a office. It is operate on Agile methodology, considerably like a place of work, so there are no lectures or studying management programs, as an alternative, there will be task professionals and they will require to locate undertaking-based answers, just like in the sector. They have venture management computer software and that is what we are employing, replicating marketplace standards as a lot as we can.

We’re commencing with two XPMCs in the thirty day period of February, in electronic finance and cyber security. We have an additional 7 streams that we are going to be launching this 12 months, like item administration, synthetic intelligence, digital transformation, offer chain, innovative production and well being informatics. We are launching all these experiential jobs this 12 months and we have experienced an too much to handle response from our schooling associates in India: they unquestionably consider it is really a brilliant strategy since it will support them to go into this place.

How do educators will need to reorient their mindsets for this new actuality?

DB: I assume one of the vital components is that we will need to transfer a great deal extra to genuine university student-centred discovering, wherever students are crucial contributors. When you go into the office, it is self-drive and engagement with all the activities you’re having that allow you to find out and increase the up coming time that you experience the exact difficulty. Professionals discover from their knowledge, getting in what they did properly, and what they didn’t do and then applying that going ahead. 

For way too prolonged, education and learning has tended to target on huge classrooms of the classic sort, mainly because we haven’t had the marvel of the digital and hybrid environment… For illustration, in Germany, I uncovered a lecture theatre that had not changed in about three hundred decades! Universities are a person of the couple locations on Earth in which you can go and locate quite much the identical setup that has been there for hundreds of many years. Which is what we’ve bought to modify, and technology enables us to do that – it will allow us to shift from studying as information transmission to engaging absolutely with it.

Is EdTech there to nutritional supplement mainstream education and learning or contend with it? What is your watch on EdTech?

DB: I believe EdTech is totally superb, from augmented actuality, virtual actuality, simulations, and all the help methods. It is the similar in any sector: know-how is building what we do so considerably much more effective, so significantly superior, we need to have to embrace it, have interaction it, and integrate it into every thing we do. 

MM: In EdTech, specially with one thing like the XPMC, technological innovation is large: we simply cannot scale experiential education across India devoid of the ideal system. Having said that, it’s not a substitute for a college degree, it’s there to enhance them: we want to work with present instruction suppliers to offer a far better understanding experience and enable advertise lifelong finding out.

In which will you be in 12 months?

DB: It is going to just take time before any new merchandise is broadly recognized, but it’s astounding how in the very last 9 months we’ve observed such interest from so numerous colleges across the region and I would like us to start out rolling out the XPMC: I seriously want to hear from learners and schools about how substantially they’ve got out of it… I also want to see businesses be similarly fired up about using on these new graduates: in about twelve months we need to have viewed batches basically graduating, so we should see a tangible change soon.

MM: We would like to see that we have now captured the profile of perform readiness for every single student – in the conclusion, scalability will only be achieved if we can map it with the perform readiness rating for person position profiles. Our very long-phrase goal is to have the particular person profiles of pupils who are building stacks of microcredentials and then mapping them with work profiles. In the subsequent 6 to 9 months, we will see most of our university companions adopting the XPMC, and all the facts produced from that will aid us refine the venture additional.

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Source connection Despite exhibiting higher levels of IQ and cognitive abilities, there is a sad reality that Indian graduates often fail to show the necessary levels of employability when entering the corporate world. This disconnect between the education being imparted and the skill set required by the workplace is nothing new and remains a major challenge for both employees and employers.

First, part of the challenge is attributed to the way education is being imparted. Traditional teaching methods, that majorly focus on cramming and mugging, do not account for the learning of soft skills that are necessary in the job market. Companies seeking fresh graduates often complain of lack of ‘job ready’ talents that they want to hire and groom further. As a result, new employees enter the job market with little knowledge of workplace ethics, communication skills and even problem-solving capabilities.

What would then be the best way to get graduates job-ready? At this juncture, experiential learning comes into the picture as the antidote to the problem. This form of learning is gaining much traction in India and is practiced by a multitude of organizations. One primary purpose of it is to bridge the gap between academia and job requirements by helping students learn through real-world scenarios.

So, how does experiential learning work and how does it have an impact? Experiential learning can include activities such as internships, project-based learning, field trips and even simulations. The primary motivation behind this form of learning is to provide hands-on experiences on the job, complete with real-world challenges and enough time to collaborate and take constructive feedback from seasoned experts. In this way, students can be groomed to handle the competitive job market and be well-equipped with the necessary skills and know-how.

India is building some of the best minds, and the challenge is to ensure these minds are employed and productive within the job market. Experiential learning is an effective and impactful way of ensuring the necessary skill set is imparted to new recruits who come armed with the potential the corporate sector so sorely needs.