Are you a graduate looking for a job? Are you short of skills to impress the big firms? Here’s the course for you…” Does this sound familiar?
The jargon used to describe vocational education may be the same, but the scope of what one can learn is changing drastically, thanks to the booming economy and businesses that engineer its growth.
So, ‘vocational courses’ will no longer have just radio, television and AC mechanic training; we will soon see programmes on retails, telecommunication, and banking! In fact, with courses that will extend to several growing sectors like hospitality, animation and graphics etc, vocational courses will soon be known in more fashionable terms as ‘professional and skill-based programmes’.
While institutions across the country continue to impart trade-skills such as automobile and radio/TV mechanic courses under their vocational programmes, the ones like Manipal Education are gradually adding courses like retailing, telecom and banking to their extending menu card. Obviously, this has created ripple of interest across the education sector.
Anand Sudarshan, CEO, Manipal Education, explains why: “Let’s not forget that our economy, at least GDP-wise, has moved in the last few years towards services sector from predominantly agriculture. The need for manpower in these business segments is therefore set to grow considerably in the foreseeable future. Given the growing and continuous manpower need, we will require training programmes from all our institutions that can either instill or polish job skills in our younger population.”
In particular, professional and skill-based programmes are targeted at school drop-outs and graduates who struggle to prove their worth in an increasingly skill-oriented job market. As Mr Sudarshan points out, pursuing skill-based courses shouldn't be presumed as a mere cake-walk. The graduates amongst them can fancy their chances in a course like ‘core banking’, while high school or PUC is enough for certain other courses.
Mr Sudarshan explains that the qualification of an individual for a course is also determined by the employers who would work with institutions in their training efforts and ultimately absorb the students. “The (industry) partner with whom we have tied up for our telecom programme -Bharathi Telecom-have for the first time announced that the low-level sales person in their organisation need not be a graduate,” he says.
 And, as against the conventional watertight separation of job-oriented training from degree programmes, the two are inextricably linked in this model. For someone who had passed a short-term course in retailing in order to get a job in a departmental stores, for instance, the bachelor course will be a three-year programme in retailing and the initial training, besides helping the student get a job, will also earn him enough credit to complete the first semester of the Bachelor course. Though the programmes will be initially recognised by Manipal University, the institution is in talk with other universities to gain wider acknowledgement for their model of skill-based training and graduate programmes. “People who speak to us are quite thrilled about this model.”
Since imparting professional skills and giving students a worthwhile qualification is a problem for all educational institutions, Manipal Education is quite willing to share the best practices with others.
Of course, the programme may be the best bet for those desperate to catch up with their peers in the competitive job market, but there lies the dangerous possibility that it would end up attracting even the academically promising students, depriving our higher education system of quality.
If this danger becomes a reality, academic institutions would end up producing fewer research scholars, whose shortage is already hurting the country’s credential as the hub of R&D.
“Further, the reason for shortage of researchers in India is that research continues to remain a financially unattractive option and the government and corporate should do more to correct that,” he concludes.