The pool of India’s young talents below 40 years constituting over two-thirds of the working-age population gives the country a major advantage in the 21st century. Though apparently, we can boast about our young population, their employability in line with their “qualification” and overwhelming expectation sends out a worrying signal. The heavy turnout of youngsters from workplaces and unavailability of the right talent for meeting emerging business challenges are serious issues of human resources development.
Be it micro or mega-size business, every one faces the challenge of right talent obtainability and its retain-ability. There are reasons to believe that the challenge has become more acute after the lockdown that has made many youngsters lazier.
On one side when there is a massive job-loss, the size of the nondeployable population has also become huge on the other side. There are plenty of reasons and the roots of all of them are also deeper. None has any doubt, our new generation is educated better than the old generation was. The new generation is technology savvier and capable of working on computers. However, being technology savvy, with the capability to work on technology ambits, alone may not qualify them to take up a job or be assigned a job. A job with such capability can make a person no better than a low-wage clerk, a British creation for Indians.
Even those who are well-versed in information technology refuse to make use of their common sense when they are put to a task. Modern institutions need talents, who are capable of handling multi-tasks in a lucid manner with no space for failure. However, we see most managers, who give many immature excuses for their failures in executing an assigned task. They either keep rolling on a single task never to deliver any result or find fault with others for their work obstruction to claim an excuse for an inordinate delay. This trend is common among all-category managers, making themselves liabilities to their employers. This issue is starker in small and mid-sized companies, which fail to attract high performers even if the higher wage is offered.
Yes, the number of managers willing to take up challenges and show their ability in building up their expertise is falling, as everyone wants to join big brands even without a track record. On the other side, in small and mid-sized companies there are plenty of job opportunities for the new generation. Incidentally, small firms do “try and throw” or “hire and fire” as what is available in the job market is only under-performing talents or inadequately trained hands.
Set aside the underperformance and inadequate training. Both these can be corrected collectively by the employee and employer. An employer can give training if the worker is found suitable for it after training.
An employee has to be mentally prepared to serve the company in better ways to ensure that he or she makes enough contribution to the company’s growth and expectation, warranting the remuneration the employer pays. It is here, the gap remains unbridged, because of the maturity issue.
There is a huge mismatch between the two generations in relative terms of mental age. The youngsters who join the workforce fail to deliver what their employers expect from them according to their educational qualification and initial claims. Many people make the mistake of using educational qualification as eligibility for a higher salary. Unfortunately, most of the educationally qualified candidates do not know their subject when they approach their workplace challenges. A commercial establishment remunerates an employee based on the value he or she gives back through the works.
What may be the fundamental reasons for such a sorry state? The first is the deteriorating quality of education.
A candidate’s inherent interest in the subject he or she studied, general understanding of the difference between school campus and workplace as well as skewed parenting are the other issues. To some extent, the problems faced by the new generation are not entirely because of their missteps. Parents also have their shares, as many youngsters had to choose their lines under compulsion of parents according to their fancy feeling of certain professions without sensing the talent of their children. They did not know where their children would land after their expensive education. That is where one of the reasons for poor talent nurturing lies. Information technology has already invaded our youngsters’ mind. They are unable to make even a simple arithmetic calculation without the help of an electronic calculator.
The old generation business giants were built with manual handling of business functions, including complicated ones. They did not fall on the wayside, because of manual functions. When the era changed and technology adoption proliferated, they continued to dominate their space, mainly because they were capable of doing business equally with and without technology support. But the new generation’s overdependence on technology makes them not only shallower in terms of brainpower but also brings in a silent disaster. Let’s see technology as an enabler to carry out bigger tasks for enhanced productivity, but not as the only remedy for every service irrespective of size and scope. I have seen companies run by older generation entrepreneurs more efficiently. They are still brilliant, unimaginable for the new generation. Many large shops with thousands of products on their floor still perfectly do their business with infallible accounts of stocks, daily sales and reconciliation. A huge shop in Navi Mumbai, running in conventional style, astounded me. Our new generation needs to learn many things from the old generation’s work-style and sincerity. Youngsters are now driven by over-confidence in finding a job in one or the other place. However, they don’t foresee job stability, long term survivability and career growth. They are unwilling to take challenges on their shoulder and surmount it by using their common sense.
Their attitude of what-is-earned-today-is-for-today without reading what is there in store for tomorrow is a precarious sign. When companies also go behind technology to overcome the shortage of quality manpower to handle huge business, there is also a risk of making the talents hugely surplus. After education also the parents do not allow their educated children to stand on their own feet. Some wanted their children to continue their studies for many years. If a person puts in 30 years for study in life, how many years would he or she be able to get in life for building a career? When one’s most productive period of life is spent on low-quality classroom study the actual period left with him to build a career would be too small to cross the middle-manager level before the next generation gets prepared to enter the workplace. Ultimately, such a scenario will lead to a huge talent crunch, one of the biggest challenges which changing India’s business world is set to face. The distress of the untrained generation will have a serious bearing on many segments of businesses, which will have to depend on technology. Over a period, technology will invade every business like how it has invaded the young minds of today.
