Who Do You Want to Be in 10 Years?

An awkward silence permeated the room for several seconds. I looked around the musty classroom, my scalp sweating, listening... yearning... for someone to say something. Instead, people slouched forward and lowered their eyes to the floor in front of their feet. Looking at the scene, you would've guessed that their parents had just chewed them out for taking a study break.

Gathered around me were 15 or so business school students from a reputed institute in South India. These were students who, I thought, were fast-tracking their career paths and launching themselves in the directions of their dreams. So why were they quiet? Why weren't they vocalizing their dreams? Why weren't they answering me??

As I've learned in the last few weeks, this scene is hardly a surprising one. It reflects the byproduct of an education system that excludes and discourages self-reflection, critical thinking, and teamwork. Students take an annual exam that determines their fate, including college admissions and job placement. This exam exemplifies the numbers culture propagated by the education system; it's all about marks ("grades"), percentages, and averages. You get certain marks, and you go to a good college. You score above the average, and you'll get a higher-paying job.

It's simple, really.

But what's simple is not necessarily in the best interests of students, companies, and the economy. The exam-oriented education system turns students into regurgitating automatons, rendering them unprepared to think out of the box, communicate effectively, and work in a team-based environment. For companies seeking creativity, social skills, and a team player attitude in a "fresher" (i.e. college graduate)... good luck. It's not that such skills are nonexistent. It's just incredibly difficult to find students that have them.

Why, you ask?

My experience in the field suggests two reasons:

1. Dynamics of the placement process.

Essentially, in a short period of time known as "placement", a well-established IT company or a brand name MNC will arrive on campus, give a company presentation, solicit resumés, interview job candidates, and give offer letters... all in the same day!! A director at one institute told me that as many as 40 students can get hired by a single company in a single day. It's a meat market, and everyone gets caught up in it.

One engineering student recognized the problem with this meat market. He told me, "The placement process is really unfair. It's a marks-driven yet very subjective process." Tangible metrics such as exam scores are primarily used to differentiate students. Soft skills, such as communication and teamwork, take a backseat as they're evaluated in a relatively brief interview.

Companies that want to take their time in getting to know job candidates, to conduct multiple rounds of interviews, and to request students to visit the office and meet the team are poorly positioned against well-paying employers that give immediate job offers. Therefore, these kinds of companies don't partake in the placement process and instead rely on other indirect and less structured recruiting channels for college students.

The emphasis on exam scores during placement gives rise to another particularly frustrating phenomenon that confounds a company's efforts to find young talent...

2. Students lack communication and personal marketing skills.

I've been told that students here simply don't realize the value of their work experience, academic projects, and extracurricular activities. This inability to understand one's self-worth, in addition to lacking communication skills, results in poorly written resumés.

I have collected a significant number of resumés from students in engineering institutes, business schools, and liberal arts colleges in order to understand whether or not students have the ability and experience to work in startup companies. A casual perusal of these resumés is nothing less than shocking. The following are anonymized resumé snippets from business school students:

Career objective: Seeking to establish telecomm firm and become an idle in the business world.

Hobbies: Watching movies like Guru, Troy, Corporate, The patriot

One liberal art student's resumé contained a name, gender, date of birth, age, contact number, e-mail address, degree, college name, and interests. That's it. Nothing else. And across the board, almost every resumé has one or more highly visible typos, misspellings, or grammar mistakes.

It's hard to blame students. Unlike many American universities, Indian institutes lack full-fledged career development centers that train students on written communication skills such as resumé writing and e-mail etiquette. These are skills that are either picked up on the job or fall by the wayside.

Getting to the point: for companies that aren't able to interact with students on campus (due to reasons noted in #1 above) and for those that rely on less structured recruiting channels such as online job portals where the resumé represents the medium of communication, life is tough. There's lots of noise and difficult-to-find signal.

This introduction to some of the issues facing higher education in India is meant to give you some context on NEN. It's about more than simply building a network or entrepreneurship ecosystem. First and foremost, it's about revolutionizing higher education by introducing creativity, teamwork, and soft skills development to the classroom. Without instigating this revolution, the mission of NEN - to inspire, educate, and support the next generation of high-growth entrepreneurs in India - is meaningless.

Stay tuned: I will give you an overview of my role as manager of NEN Startup Jobs, a program meant to address some of the issues mentioned here!