An excerpt from an interview with S. Shandilya, Chairman Eicher Group:

Despite my dislike for the corporate, I have a fancy for corporate honchos’ take on so many things- good vs bad, private vs public, employer vs employee, India vs the US of A, retention vs attrition, Monday blues vs Friday revelry, application side vs the non-application one, demand vs supply, number churning vs useability, urban vs rural governance, rupee vs dollar, employee vs entrepreneur, stress vs professionalism and so and so forth. In short, I love their views on anything and everything under the sun. Not to mention, this exclusive interview by Mr. Shandilya on a channel was a delight to watch and listen to.
He opines that demand has far overtaken the supply and the graduates that are being churned out by the current education system are not employable in the strictest of sense. However, low cost jobs have to be outsourced and end-to-end solutions have to be provided. Which is why, corporate has no choice but to recruit and boast of recruiting in hordes. The solution that the corporate has taken recourse to in order to counter lack of competence in any definitive skill-set is to train the unemployable employee at the outset. This results in a huge drain of time, money, resources and the other intangible assets too. The worst facet of all this is that the trainee more often than not utilizes the training expertise somewhere else and if not, then the trainee does not utilize it anywhere at all. Ultimately, it becomes a zero sum game for the training company.
The discussion veered to the attrition monster, which is the corporate bugbear. Mr. Shandilya’s take on attrition is not a critical one. He analyzes the pros and cons of it. It is wrong to decry attrition outrightingly without realizing that normal attrition per se is okay. It is when attrition reaches the height in sectors like IT/ITES where growth rate is one among the best the alarm bells start ringing. But then the reason can be manifold. Many of the times higher growth does that (people switch over at the drop of the hat for a measly salasy hike of Rs. 1000 per month), on other times the missing role clarity does the harm (people are confused as to what exactly is their profile and change because they spot the disconnect between the initial offer and the actual project work being done) and sometimes higher stress level is the bane (You ask, “Oh my god, even the Senior Project manager is working like hell. Is there any respite even few years down the line?). There are many other reasons. But the demand outstrips supply and not-so-effective remedial measures can be benching, temping or going for legal contracts that are many a times not legally enforceable and not recognized by law.
The root problem still remains that the grass-root educational level still remains an impregnable fortress for the corporate because it requires a massive effort and where is the time for it? ITC’s e-chaupal initiative can be a one-off case in the point. The public-private-partnership is still in its infancy in India. Ultimately it results in unskilled manpower being churned out the educational factories. The Ram Gopal Verma’s Factory is doing the same in movies because it believes that audience wants a large number of movies no matter if they are devoid of quality. That is analogous and metaphorical as it almost a similar scenario in the education sector. The industry-academia interface is not proper and CII is upping the ante against the same. Then again ‘Train the trainer’ module can be effective provided the trainer is paid well and the cliché that is associated with it that training is a part-time career has to be discouraged.
I will love to post more on this later.