f********8
发帖数: 1417 | 1 India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire
BANGALORE, India—Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate
to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants
to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people,
that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door
can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of
educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire
just three out of every 100 applicants.
Many recent engineering grads in India say that after months of job hunting
they are still unemployed and lack the skills necessary to join the
workforce. Critics say corruption and low standards are to blame. Poh Si
Teng reports from New Delhi.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of
students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-
paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been
cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing
competitive challenges.
Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing
difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to
expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000
employees are now based outside of India.
In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so
short of talent that it is having to offshore.
"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees
," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every
nook and cranny."
India's economic expansion was supposed to create opportunities for millions
to rise out of poverty, get an education and land good jobs. But as India
liberalized its economy starting in 1991 after decades of socialism, it
failed to reform its heavily regulated education system.
Flawed Miracle
The Journal is examining the threats to, and limits of, India's economic
ascent.
In India, Doubts Gather Over Rising Giant's Course India's Growth Battle
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Take a look at India's economy 20 years after the country abandoned its
Soviet-style, centrally planned economic model, embraced capitalism and jump
-started economic growth.
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Wipro Program Takes on Education Woes Business executives say schools are
hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than
critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which
makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries
and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the
curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.
"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," says Vijay Thadani, chief executive
of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-
training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.
Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the
demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates.
Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students,
nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National
Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.
But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are
unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information
technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests
administered by the group.
Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental
organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-
school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half
of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.
At stake is India's ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to
expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to
do business.
The challenge is especially pressing given the country's more youthful
population than the U.S., Europe and China. More than half of India's
population is under the age of 25, and one million people a month are
expected to seek to join the labor force here over the next decade, the
Indian government estimates. The fear is that if these young people aren't
trained well enough to participate in the country's glittering new economy,
they pose a potential threat to India's stability.
"Economic reforms are not about goofy rich guys buying Mercedes cars," says
Manish Sabharwal, managing director of Teamlease Services Ltd., an employee
recruitment and training firm in Bangalore. "Twenty years of reforms are
worth nothing if we can't get our kids into jobs."
Yet even as the government and business leaders acknowledge the labor
shortage, educational reforms are a long way from becoming law. A bill that
gives schools more autonomy to design their own curriculum, for example, is
expected to be introduced in the cabinet in the next few weeks, and in
parliament later this year.
"I was not prepared at all to get a job," says Pradeep Singh, 23, who
graduated last year from RKDF College of Engineering, one of the city of
Bhopal's oldest engineering schools. He has been on five job interviews—
none of which led to work. To make himself more attractive to potential
employers, he has enrolled in a five-month-long computer programming course
run by NIIT.
Mr. Singh and several other engineering graduates said they learned quickly
that they needn't bother to go to some classes. "The faculty take it very
casually, and the students take it very casually, like they've all agreed
not to be bothered too much," Mr. Singh says. He says he routinely missed a
couple of days of classes a week, and it took just three or four days of
cramming from the textbook at the end of the semester to pass the exams.
Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant.
Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top
engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick
That's what he did for a theory-of-computation exam, and shortly after, he
says the examiner called him and offered to pass him and his friends if they
paid 10,000 rupees each, about $250. He and four friends pulled together
the money, and they all passed the test.
"I feel almost 99% certain that if I didn't pay the money, I would have
failed the exam again," says Mr. Sharma.
BC Nakra, Pro Vice Chancellor of ITM University, where Mr. Sharma studied,
said in an interview that there is no cheating at his school, and that if
anyone were spotted cheating in this way, he would be "behind bars." He said
he had read about a case or two in the newspaper, and in the "rarest of the
rare cases, it might happen somewhere, and if you blow [it] out of all
proportions, it effects the entire community." The examiner couldn't be
located for comment.
Cheating aside, the Indian education system needs to change its entire
orientation to focus on learning, says Saurabh Govil, senior vice president
in human resources at Wipro Technologies. Wipro, India's third largest
software exporter by sales, says it has struggled to find skilled workers.
The problem, says Mr. Govil, is immense: "How are you able to change the
mind-set that knowledge is more than a stamp?"
At 24/7 Customer's recruiting center on a recent afternoon, 40 people were
filling out forms in an interior lobby filled with bucket seats. In a glass-
walled conference room, a human-resources executive interviewed a group of
seven applicants. Six were recent college graduates, and one said he was
enrolled in a correspondence degree program.
One by one, they delivered biographical monologues in halting English. The
interviewer interrupted one young man who spoke so fast, it was hard to tell
what he was saying. The young man was instructed to compose himself and
start from the beginning. He tried again, speaking just as fast, and was
rejected after the first round.
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Another applicant, Rajan Kumar, said he earned a bachelor's degree in
engineering a couple of years ago. His hobby is watching cricket, he said,
and his strength is punctuality. The interviewer, noting his engineering
degree, asked why he isn't trying to get a job in a technical field, to
which he replied: "Right now, I'm here." This explanation was judged
inadequate, and Mr. Kumar was eliminated, too.
A 22-year-old man named Chaudhury Laxmikant Dash, who graduated last year,
also with a bachelor's in engineering, said he's a game-show winner whose
hobby is international travel. But when probed by the interviewer, he
conceded, "Until now I have not traveled." Still, he made it through the
first-round interview, along with two others, a woman and a man who filled
out his application with just one name, Robinson.
For their next challenge, they had to type 25 words a minute. The woman
typed a page only to learn her pace was too slow at 18 words a minute. Mr.
Dash, sweating and hunched over, couldn't get his score high enough, despite
two attempts.
Only Mr. Robinson moved on to the third part of the test, featuring a single
paragraph about nuclear war followed by three multiple-choice questions. Mr
. Robinson stared at the screen, immobilized. With his failure to pass the
comprehension section, the last of the original group of applicants was
eliminated.
The average graduate's "ability to comprehend and converse is very low,"
says Satya Sai Sylada, 24/7 Customer's head of hiring for India. "That's the
biggest challenge we face."
Indeed, demand for skilled labor continues to grow. Tata Consultancy
Services, part of the Tata Group, expects to hire 65,000 people this year,
up from 38,000 last year and 700 in 1986.
Trying to bridge the widening chasm between job requirements and the skills
of graduates, Tata has extended its internal training program. It puts fresh
graduates through 72 days of training, double the duration in 1986, says
Tata chief executive N. Chandrasekaran. Tata has a special campus in south
India where it trains 9,000 recruits at a time, and has plans to bump that
up to 10,000.
Wipro runs an even longer, 90-day training program to address what Mr. Govil
, the human-resources executive, calls the "inherent inadequacies" in Indian
engineering education. The company can train 5,000 employees at once.
Both companies sent teams of employees to India's approximately 3,000
engineering colleges to assess the quality of each before they decided where
to focus their campus recruiting efforts. Tata says 300 of the schools made
the cut; for Wipro, only 100 did.
Tata has also begun recruiting and training liberal-arts students with no
engineering background but who want secure jobs. And Wipro has set up a
foundation that spends $4 million annually to train teachers. Participants
attend week-long workshops and then get follow-up online mentoring. Some say
that where they used to spend a third of class time with their backs to
students, drawing diagrams on the blackboard, they now engage students in
discussion and use audiovisual props.
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Vivek M. for The Wall Street Journal
Job applicants at 24/7, which says only three of 100 are qualified.
"Before, I didn't take the students into consideration," says Vishal
Nitnaware, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at SVPM College of
Engineering in rural Maharashtra state. Now, he says, he tries to engage
them, so they're less nervous to speak up and participate in discussions.
This kind of teaching might have helped D.H. Shivanand, 25, the son of
farmers from a village outside of Bangalore. He just finished a master's
degree in business administration—in English—from one of Bangalore's top
colleges. His father borrowed the $4,500 tuition from a small lending agency
. Now, almost a year after graduating, Mr. Shivanand is still looking for an
entry-level finance job.
Tata and IBM Corp., among dozens of other firms, turned him down, he says,
after he repeatedly failed to answer questions correctly in the job
interviews. He says he actually knew the answers but froze because he got
nervous, so he's now taking a course to improve his confidence, interviewing
skills and spoken English. His family is again pitching in, paying 6,000
rupees a month for his rent, or about $130, plus 1,500 rupees for the course
, or $33.
"My family has invested so much money in my education, and they don't
understand why I am still not finding a job," says Mr. Shivanand. "They are
hoping very, very much that I get a job soon, so after all of their
investment, I will finally support them."
—Poh Si Teng and Arlene Chang contributed to this article.
Write to Geeta Anand at g*********[email protected] | v***t
发帖数: 27100 | 2 三国一半人口25岁一下？
hire
hunting
【在 f********8 的大作中提到】
: India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire
: BANGALORE, India—Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate
: to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants
: to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people,
: that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
: So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door
: can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of
: educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire
: just three out of every 100 applicants.
: Many recent engineering grads in India say that after months of job hunting
| h*****p
发帖数: 2638 | 3 三哥平均年龄25岁，相比较中国的是35岁，美国也是35岁
【在 v***t 的大作中提到】
: 三国一半人口25岁一下？
:
: hire
: hunting
| v***t
发帖数: 27100 | 4 三国是不是很短命？
【在 h*****p 的大作中提到】
: 三哥平均年龄25岁，相比较中国的是35岁，美国也是35岁
| l******e
发帖数: 12192 | 5 人均寿命短呀
【在 v***t 的大作中提到】
: 三国一半人口25岁一下？
:
: hire
: hunting
| v***t
发帖数: 27100 | 6 考，三国可能有75％的人比我年轻，唉，老了老了
【在 l******e 的大作中提到】
: 人均寿命短呀
| l******e
发帖数: 12192 | 7 是
民主国家没有人口老龄化的负担
【在 v***t 的大作中提到】
: 三国是不是很短命？
| v***t
发帖数: 27100 | 8 民主国家土葬还是火葬？啥恒河还是刨坑？坑收费么？
【在 l******e 的大作中提到】
: 是
: 民主国家没有人口老龄化的负担
| l******e
发帖数: 12192 | 9 直接回归自然，流回母亲河
【在 v***t 的大作中提到】
: 民主国家土葬还是火葬？啥恒河还是刨坑？坑收费么？
| v***t
发帖数: 27100 | 10 三哥种地是不是不用尿素化肥的？
【在 l******e 的大作中提到】
: 直接回归自然，流回母亲河
| l******e
发帖数: 12192 | 11 不知道
这个得问xt
【在 v***t 的大作中提到】
: 三哥种地是不是不用尿素化肥的？
| f****l
发帖数: 8042 | 12 不是老早就说了，现在call center更喜欢菲律宾，据说菲音比印音更接近美音。 | G*****n
发帖数: 3863 | 13 最关键的我看倒不是英文，而是智商。语言再好，不懂common sense，解决不了问题，
之能在那里“hello sir hello sir”的，有p用。 |
|
