Very few Engineering and Management graduates from small towns are employable. The ones getting employed are paid very less. Hence, educational institutes must reconsider various aspects of the quality of education they get.
One of the aspects is their approach toward placement training. They should contemplate the following six factors if they want their students to be employable.
1. Acknowledge the need for the skills that matter:
The general culture almost everywhere in India is to score well in exams. The entire focus is on clearing exams by hook or by crook. But clearing exams is just one aspect that makes one eligible for a job. There are several other skills that students need to be employable.
Companies nowadays expect candidates to have skills like - Working in Teams, Time Management, Goal Setting, Email Etiquette, Telephone Etiquette, Computer Competence, Corporate Etiquette, Communication Skills, etc. as a prerequisite. The Institutes from small towns need to acknowledge the fact that their students need such skills to be employable.
2. Identify the training needs:
Students from different backgrounds have different training needs that need to be identified and catered to. We need experts to identify the training needs and design training programs accordingly. Most educational institutes fail to do so because they still rely on less experienced faculty to develop training programs and conduct training sessions without realizing the fact that teaching and training are different from one another.
3. Hire competent training providers:
There are very few training providers that work towards making the students employable. Most of them make money at the cost of a lack of knowledge of training at educational institutes in small towns. Hence, knowing answers to the following questions can help educational institutes in identifying competent training providers:
How does training work?
What are the different training methodologies?
What kind of training suits your students?
Who can provide the required training without compromising on quality and assuring growth in placements?
How can the impact of training be measured?
How much does quality training cost in the market?
4. Use appropriate training methodology:
The training ideally starts only after the training needs are identified and the relevant courseware and suitable methodology are developed for the same. However, the general trend is of buying ready-made courseware offered by the training providers. The lack of need-based training is causing the damage here. We also need to identify the right methods to impart training. i.e., content, activities, simulations, etc.
5. Proper evaluation of training is a must:
Many Educational Institutes don't have the expertise to gauge the effectiveness of a training program. Deciding the quality of training merely based on the students’ feedback can be misleading. Most of the students from small towns attend a training program for the first time in their lives. They are bound to be impressed by the way a trainer speaks or behaves during training. These students hardly know:
What they are to be trained for
How they are expected to be trained
Whether the skills imparted during training are really useful for them or not
Many such factors need to be considered for evaluating a training program. A careful evaluation certainly helps in enhancing the quality of training.
6. Observe the training sessions:
Educational Institutes often trust the training providers and trainers blindly. There is no check on the trainers' competency and background either. Incompetent trainers merely kill time in the training sessions by conducting activities that hardly help the students improve their skills.
Every session needs meticulous planning, without which training is nothing but a waste of time and money. The content needs to be appropriately chosen to yield the expected results. Hence, we need to observe what happens in the training sessions.
Sawan is a Learning/Training consultant with over thirteen years of rich experience in training. He has been associated with companies like Amazon, Various Multinational and Domestic Companies, Leading Training Organizations, and prestigious Educational Institutes. He is a go-to person for setting up and leading training teams, managing training programs, and creating and curating content for online and offline learning. He is passionate about helping companies revive their training interventions and enable their workforce to achieve business goals.