Getting educated!

During the entire month of June, almost all the national and regional dailies have been routinely carrying news reports on results of the various national (school-leaving) board examinations, and the trauma being faced by the young teenagers (and their parents) while reviewing future options for higher studies and then getting admissions into the colleges of their choice (with subjects of their choice).

To the best of my knowledge, no other country in the world (with the possible exceptions of Japan, Singapore and France) subjects its youngsters to this kind of a pressure situation as we do in India.

Part of the blame, of course, has to be taken up by our Ministry of Human Resource Development, which has failed to carry out any serious planning effort or forecasts on the higher education needs of India as well as that of the 25-plus million children that are born every year.

Public spending on upgrading the university system across the country has significantly lagged in the last two decades, and little support has been lent to encourage high-quality private investment in the education sector, leaving the field open to "entrepreneurs" many of whom have dubious credentials and commitment to the cause of education.

However, a part of the blame also has to be taken by the parents of these young scholars.

In my view, it is the responsibility of each parent to make some investment in some very basic understanding of the current trends in the economy of the nation, and then do some very elementary forecasting of the future skill-set needs that can then provide a much larger set of career options to their children.

Most of these parents have not thought beyond the usual choice of encouraging their children to become an (IIT) engineer or a doctor or a chartered accountant or a commerce/science honours graduate with an ambition to then get an (IIM) MBA.

With over 3.2 million kids passing out each year from the 12th grade and seeking college-level education, it is an incredibly difficult task to limit the options to no more than 25,000 seats in the premium colleges across these four major career preferences or perhaps no more than 1,500,000 seats if the non-premium colleges, medical and allied courses and state colleges and universities are also included.

One fundamental change that an average parent (of a school-leaving child) has overlooked is the fact that like all developed countries in the world, the Indian economy has also changed from being an agriculture-dominant to an agriculture-plus-manufacturing-dominant to now a services-dominant economy.

While agriculture and manufacturing sectors shall remain crucial and very important to the country, the real growth in employment opportunities is likely to come from the services sector.

Services that are likely to see a dramatic boom in the years to come include retailing, healthcare, restaurant and food services, hospitality, leisure and entertainment, media and communication, travel and tourism, banking and finance, insurance, education, transportation and logistics, architecture/town planning, interior design, speciality services such as therapy, personal care, exercise/well being, etc.

Do the children have to be an engineer and/or an MBA or a chartered accountant to make a successful career in these new sectors of the economy? Certainly not! Does the healthcare sector need only doctors and nursing staff?

To even the very average-informed individual, it would become apparent that healthcare services management and administration requires a large number of individuals having very different skill sets (scheduling, planning, data base management, accounting, inventory management, information management, nutrition and catering, laundry/waste management, etc to list just a few).

Retail sector will need millions of employees at all levels starting from the entry-level sales assistants right up to specialists in buying, visual merchandising, store design, facilities management, data base management, CRM specialists, marketing and promotion, etc. The list goes on and on across each of the service sectors I have listed above.

My advice to the stressed parents and their career-seeking children would be to "take it easy" to start with. Our economy is finally giving us many more choices to build respectable and economically satisfying career options that can, in most cases, be easily matched with aptitude and natural strengths of our children.

The parents must think out-of-the-box to guide their children towards exploring some of these new options, and build careers in those sectors and functional areas that are likely to be in big demand in the coming decades.

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