Industrial Training: Bridging the Gap betwee Education and Industry Expectations

Industrial Training of one month to six months duration is part of all engineering, MCA and BCA curriculums but most of the students don’t understand its purpose and relevance and as a result they fail to utilize it. The purpose of this article is to spread awareness about the Industrial Training and how one can use it as a platform for career building.
Need of Industrial Training (Employability versus Employment):

Employability is defined as the acquisition of those skills, which not only help in landing a job but also allow a person to remain employable. Currently while there is no dearth of opportunities in the employment scenario, there is a serious lack of employable talent.

According to a 2005 McKinsey study, only 25 per cent of our engineering graduates, 15 per cent of our finance and accounting professionals and 10 percent of professionals with any kind of degrees, in India, are suitable for working in multinational companies.

A recent research by a Bangalore based skill assessment company indicates that only 10% of all talent being chu
ed out by the academia today is employable.

Vineet Nayar, Vice Chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies Ltd. has posted his view in a blog on Harvard Business Review regarding employability as: “In most parts of the world, education and employability are not in step with each other, resulting in individual companies having to pick up the slack with significant investments in training.”

It is vital here to differentiate between mere talent and employable talent. While there is abundant talent in India, the proportion of industry-ready
candidates is alarmingly low, posing a huge challenge for the industry in meeting its requirement.

The purpose of Industrial Training is to provide a platform to eligible but unemployable candidates to fill this yawning gap by gaining industry specific skills.
What is the most important criteria of training?
Trainer is the most important criteria for finding out the quality and success of training. Brand, Infrastructure, curriculum, fee and discounts etc are useless if the trainer is not able enough to deliver the training. Most of the big name in training industry would make you believe that they have standard methodology and all their trainers are well qualified and experienced. You must be wary of such claims and must demand one to one interaction with the trainers to find out the fact. In the debate on inflation in parliament, Mr. Yashwant Sinha has said in response to the growth numbers presented by the government “We can’t ask the poor that we have a growth of 8% eat it, numbers don’t satisfy hunger”. Same is true in respect to training, brand doesn’t provide the training; trainer does.