How would you correlate the educational architecture, employability & attrition ratio at work place? What steps have you taken to minimize the attrition ratio?
Our education system tends to be a bit skewed on theoretical & conceptual learning with weak linkages to application in the real world. A curriculum more aligned to challenges faced by Corporates in the real world, would help in reducing the settling-in time of B-school graduates significantly.
While the Premier / A-category B-Schools are aware of this and have started working on the same, there are many others who still have some way to go. In the recent past, there has to be more emphasis on industry interactions, live case studies, interaction with senior professionals from the industry,leveraging alumni network etc. But a lot more still needs to be done.
At Dabur, we try to bridge the ‘Campus-to- Corporate’ gap for our Management Trainees through a structured three-session intervention called C2C. Typically, our education system, right from nursery school to B-School tends to be individual performance and competition oriented, catalysing a Win-Lose paradigm at a sub-conscious level. Whereas, the Corporate life is all about Win-Win, collaboration, working in teams, and achieving shared goals without diluting individual accountability.
The government’s Skill India initiative, I feel, will also help make our rural youth, employable and also arm them will skills to make them self-employed. At Dabur, we have initiated the Swavalamban programme that seeks to make the rural youth more employable by arming them with the requisite skill sets. Being run in association with RUDSETI, this initiative will provide training to rural youth on three key areas of Sales, Merchandising and Promotion. The initiative will also seek to provide guaranteed employment to these youth, post completing their training. We have already trained 46 youth and they have been employed in Dabur, Britannia, Airtel and Tata Tea to name a few. We have targeted to train at least 75 rural youth this year under this programme.
In addition, we have also been running vocational training centres in rural UP, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh and have been teaching a variety of skills to girls in the villages. In 2014-15 alone, 586 women have been trained on a variety of skills ranging from cutting-tailoring to beautician & salon, handicraft making, food processing etc.
How do you see the Indian market for new startups? What’s more to be done to improve the ecosystem?
The Indian ecosystem for startups is an evolving one and it’s evolving rapidly. India has truly woken up to the idea and potential of startups and we are seeing a growing number of venture capitalists ready to put in big bucks. As the Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said, “we have incubators, accelerators and investors willing to back an idea and assume risks.”
Independent analysis and reports have stated that India is in the midst of a start-up revolution and is poised to be the world’s fastest growing start-up ecosystem, with the numbers set to grow from just about 3,000 start-ups in 2014 to nearly 12,000 in 2020.
While there are a lot of professionals leaving their corporate jobs to become start-up entrepreneurs, we are also seeing some these start-ups emerge as the preferred employers for a growing population of new graduates. And these start-ups are also adopting innovative approaches to attract and retain top talent.
However, what many of these start-ups lack is a proper scaling plan. Having an innovative idea is important but having the vision to take that idea forward and create a big enterprise out of that idea is equally important. The Government should also work towards creating supportive policies in terms of ease of doing business, tax incentives etc to help improve the evolving start-up ecosystem in the country. CIJ
