News Letter Volume 2 April 2012 Employability skills for underserved youth Geese are birds of valor that never leave behind one of their kind. Strong communicators, they forge ahead confident and brave, synergizing and building on each others’ strengths.
NIIT Foundation is working towards employability of underserved youth in urban slums and rural areas.
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News Letter Volume 2
April 2012
Employability skills for underserved youth
Geese are birds of valor that never leave
behind one of their kind. Strong
communicators, they forge ahead confident
and brave, synergizing and building on
each others’ strengths.
2
EDITORIAL
Sustaining Social Initiatives
There are many thoughts around sustenance that
have been tried and continue to be innovated
upon. However, I want to highlight a few
perspectives that need to be leveraged more often
and more holistically too to build sustainable
movements in the social sector:
1. Inclusivity: Sustainability of social initiatives is
ensured when we look at inclusivity from both
ends -- for example, a model that focuses on
employability of the poor and underprivileged
youth - works better if we can include the middle
class youth and may be even the rich as
well. Earlier, I had not really thought like this -
was always mentally excluding the better off
people from the initiative. But what stops us
from offering the services to people who can
probably pay more and also value it more at
times? People are already talking about reverse
innovation where innovation for the third world
starts being valued in the developed world. It
brings a different set of challenges to the table -
but ones that are more addressable as well as
make the offering better for all. This is inclusivity
the other way round.
2. Partnerships: Partnerships should be true to the
word - sharing of both risks and gains. This
changes the mind-set from the customer-
supplier relationships that we were getting into.
For all 'partnerships' - of course the challenge is
(a) having partners sharing the gains and (b)
having the partners accept the risks from the
venture. To be able to get into a strong
partnership – addressing these two
challenges one needs to focus on
building trust by – having regular and
open lines of communication,
sharing forward plans pro-actively,
and taking the first step of sharing
the gains. Why do this but? To
leverage partner expertise:
L e v e r a g e P a r t n e r
Expertise: Partners bring some
uniqueness, something special
to the partnership. However,
these are not always tangible and
overtly stated.
So one aspect is to recognize what the
partnerships add to us – then we can look at
leveraging. For example, a partner may be just
providing for space for us to operate but if we
look closely, we find they have a unique ability
to mobilize corporates to support the
initiatives, or have demonstrated successful
placements of students at salaries higher than
most other similar organizations.
3. Balance of Technology: Typical belief today
says using technology reduces costs of
operations. My experience says slightly
different though. Almost invariably,
technology adds costs in the first few years
and by the time it starts to become efficient –
technology changes! What I call balance of
technology is to walk the middle path between
changes in technology and changes in the real
world. When the changes in real world are few
(financial profitability), changing technology is
a good thing. On the other hand if the real
world is evolving fast (how humans learn),
sticking to old technology is a good thing. I
know there would be disagreements on this
one but I am putting it out there for some
more thought and discussion.
Best wishes
Neeraj Agarwal
3
READER’S ANGLE
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related to employability issues facing the country.
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Why Define Indian Employ-Ability ?
By Dr. Anamika Biswas,
Director, Programmes
Indira Gandhi National Centre For the Arts
Every year, India produces almost twice the number
of engineers produced by the US and has one of
the world‟s largest qualified pools of technical
manpower. Yet qualification fails to guarantee
employ-ability, in which India lags far behind. In
other words, our education system is constantly
contributing to educated un-employability.
“Employ-ability”, a global corporate challenge
became familiar in India in the last decade. Yet
there is a general misunderstanding between the
concepts of „unemployment‟ and „unemployability‟.
Un-employment is a state where individuals have
educational eligibility and skills but dearth of job
opportunities. Un-employability arises when
available educated individuals lack the „skills‟ to
execute tasks within a job. So there are vacancies