Making Higher Education More Relevant and Practical (original) (raw)

The shortage of appropriately skilled labour across many industries is emerging as a significant and complex challenge to India's growth and future. According to NASSCOM, each year over 3 million graduates and postgraduates are added to the Indian workforce. However, of these only 25 percent of technical graduates and 10-15 percent of other graduates are considered employable by the rapidly growing IT and ITES segments. Hence, what we have today is a growing skills gap reflecting the slim availability of high-quality college education in India and the galloping pace of the country's service-driven economy, which is growing faster than most countries in the world. As businesses propose to double and triple their workforces and India Inc. strives to maintain its position in the global marketplace, it has become imperative to prepare and plan for a world-class, competent, talented and innovative workforce. One of the approaches to tackle the problem of lacking job readiness in the Indian IT sector is partnerships between the industry and academia. Many IT companies are partnering with engineering colleges and universities. Infosys has launched a program called 'Campus Connect' to align the education being given at various engineering colleges, with the requirements of the industry. Wipro has also started a program called the Wipro Academy of Software Excellence, in association with BITS (Pilani) to prepare fresh graduates for careers in software programming and provide them with the necessary skills. Many multinationals have also established alliances with academic institutions on specific initiatives covering faculty upgradation, internships, curriculum revision workshops, research incubation, etc. aggregating the architects of the new global economy. The sample which has been used for collecting data for this paper is from T.Y.B.Com. students, who are undergoing articleship. As these students are working in Multinational Corporations they were able to give correct feedback on the college syllabus. They were able to help the researcher to know whether the current syllabus is able to provide the skills which are required in the industry. Questionnaire was provided to the students from 10 commerce colleges and data was collected from them. This data has been used as primary data to write this research paper. The syllabus of Business Communication of F.Y.B.Com. prescribed by the University of Mumbai has been used by the researcher as secondary data. The activities conducted in Business Communication are Interviews, Group discussions, conducting meetings and conferences, tools used for Public relations (internal and external tools which can be discussed in board room), how different objectives like persuasion, raising morale of employees, information, training, can be used while communicating in board rooms,