If the supplied statistics are to be believed, only one-quarter of the 400,000 engineers graduated from India's universities and colleges are deemed employable, because they lack the people skills necessary to work well with other team members locally and around the world.
That's not my assessment, but rather the assertion of Dale Carnegie Training, the New York-based firm that is the legacy of the granddaddy of self-help authors. The firm says it's helping some engineers there to become the kind of job candidates people want. They're doing this, a news release states, at Bangalore's newly opened Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School.
"Technical proficiency and academic qualifications aren't enough to get a job," the announcement quotes Pallavi Jha, managing director of Walchand PeopleFirst, India's leading personal development organization. "To be employable, graduates need to meet the recruitment requirements of today's global corporations with presences
in Bangalore (corporations [such as] Sun Microsystems, IBM, Texas Instruments, and General Electric) and yet these skills aren't taught within India's formal education system."
According to the Carnegie firm, "The Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School offers 16 weeks of intensive classroom instruction, followed by eight weeks of industry internship placement. The first class began in October 2007 and upon its completion, the school will impart 3,000 'newly employable' professionals in the information technology arena … professionals with world-class business skills and what they hope will someday be a six figure earning potential." (Presumably, that's
six figures in U.S. dollars.)
The announcement states "the goal of The Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School is to instill in its trainees the 'soft' psychometric and behavioral skills they must acquire in order to move past the interview stage, such as a demonstrated ability to lead and engage team members as well as a demonstrated ability to build both internal and external business relationships."
According to Peter Handal, president, chairman and chief executive officer of Dale Carnegie Training, the firm "formulated ... [the] Finishing School's curriculum based on extensive research on Indian employability requirements as relayed by global IT industry leaders. With this knowledge, we designed the school to be interactive, experiential, and directed towards the development of skills necessary for corporate success in the global marketplace. In many ways, I guess you could say that The Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School is transforming Bangalore, India into a Silicon Valley-in-training."
Such training might be of benefit to other budding entrepreneurial islands around the world, perhaps.
— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times
