Kanika Datta: The promise-performance gap

SWOT

The formidable five-page CV on the table bristled with qualifications. This was an economics merit student who had later taken an engineering degree and then sat for an MBA from a local institute.

He was, his CV informed us, about to complete a high-level course in accounting. He had also thought fit to include a section entitled: "Personal Traits."

This confidently described him as "hard-working, sincere and ready to take on challenges". And yet, despite this armoury of credentials, here he was, applying for a low-tech editorial job in a newspaper.

This was in the early nineties and it was clear that his was a desperate scattershot attempt to find a job, any job""the growing opportunities that flowed from economic reform were still some years away.

Since aspiring journalists in my day rarely took such pains to equip themselves with so many qualifications, let alone offer earnest assurances of hard work, we asked him to sit for our mandatory test for sub-editors and reporters out of sheer curiosity.

It was a standard test, consisting of checking basic general knowledge and grasp of English, and the first part at least should not have posed a challenge to an economics graduate.

How did he fare? General knowledge: dodgy. Yes, he knew who Manmohan Singh and Ratan Tata were, Montek Singh Ahluwalia was vaguely described as a "senior minister" (he was then still a senior and influential bureaucrat) and he couldn't spell out the full form of GATT.

English skills: Oh dear ...

The Case of the Overqualified but Unsuitable Candidate was one of many similar cases I've encountered over the years""and I am always happy to think that the economic liberalisation helped them find more appropriate compensation for their anxious accumulation of degrees.

Two developments this week, however, brought their stories forcibly to mind. The first was the headline results of a recent survey from the McKinsey Quarterly* that were excerpted in The Strategist, Business Standard's weekly management and marketing section, earlier this week.

The second was the news that the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) had withdrawn recognition to two courses run by Amity Business School, Noida.

Let's take the results of the survey first. It revealed that Indian business leaders were more optimistic about the future than their international peers.

Yet, their perception of the biggest constraints to growth was telling: It was the high cost and low availability of talent. Significantly, too, the apprehensions were the highest in our perceived boom industries: IT, telecom, healthcare and pharma.

This comprehensively contradicts much of the collective spin doctoring that goes on about India as a value-for-money talent pool. It also succinctly highlights the mismatch between our education systems and the real requirements of business and industry that is under increasing competitive pressures globally and in India.

Like the economics/engineering/B-school graduate, there is no shortage of highly qualified aspirants; like him, again, there is often a startling (and somewhat depressing) gap between promise and performance.

Every year, more than 60,000 MBAs come on the market as do a slightly lower number of engineering and computer graduates. Add to this job aspirants from other technical courses such as architecture and so on. Given the pace of economic growth, it is a fair bet that these numbers hugely exceed the available demand. In other words, corporations clearly have the opportunity to pick and choose the best talent and derive value from them.

And yet, here we have senior business executives in India worrying about talent and their high cost. Why high cost? Because as an HRD executive in a FMCG multinational once pointed out, they have to train them all over again. An occasional series that The Strategist runs entitled "What they don't teach you at B-school" is a fairly accurate indicator of the problems.

There is no doubt that regulatory bodies like the AICTE bear a significant responsibility for this quality-deficit. In the aftermath of l'affaire Amity Business School, the AICTE's vice-chairman, Professor R A Yadav, has rightly pointed out that the priority now should be on consolidation rather than expansion.

But it is the AICTE that has contributed in no small measure to the abysmally low standards in B-school education - outside of the IIMs and a handful of major-league players.

With accreditation stipulations mostly focusing on a minimum number of classrooms, faculty and computers, the entry barriers have been so low as to attract all manner of entrepreneurs for whom a B-school is merely a lucrative rent-paying proposition.

Admittedly the AICTE is now making mid-course corrections""expect many more de-recognitions soon""with new guidelines, but I suspect the effort will be Canutian in impact. It might make more sense for the body to go back to the drawing board and set standards that are not only more rigorous but also more meaningful for industry.

India will always produce its brilliant students from brilliant institutions""it's the standard of the average institutions that needs to be raised. That will give India a far more durable and valuable cutting edge in the global talent stakes than low cost and, ultimately, low quality.

*McKinsey Quarterly survey of 9,347 global business executives, March 2005.

The views expressed here are personal