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Capital talk:Earned learning works

Hindustan Times | By
Nov 22, 2015 10:12 AM IST

LEARNING! The only real route to great riches remains the most vital skill one can have in the professional space. Yet, it is the most neglected concept in the country, especially in northern states like Punjab, my home state.

LEARNING! The only real route to great riches remains the most vital skill one can have in the professional space. Yet, it is the most neglected concept in the country, especially in northern states like Punjab, my home state.

Most people think of L(EARNING) (note the brackets) as something of a chore, something not required, not realising that the word also has key to the world’s riches, relaxation and leisure as EARNING is in-built into the word itself (please note and internalise the connection).

Each and every lesson that we learn (or earn) has the potential to actually make our lives easier, while also allowing us to lawfully accumulate more of money, bank balance and pelf.

The concept is also closely related to the idea of social trust that was touched upon in the previous write-up.

SOCIAL TRUST AND LEARNING

Social trust implies that we trust our men and women of learning to not only use their knowledge and wisdom to accumulate riches and worldly pleasures for their own selfish gain, but also for the betterment of their surroundings and thus the world.

What percentage of people actually does this, remains a moot question?

Yet, in today’s an age when information access seems so easy and fast (everything can be GOOGLED), the ability to learn gainfully is something that is fast getting eroded.

For the job market, this portends quite a scary future.

Experience tells us that the quality of graduates coming out of our universities and colleges – leaving apart certain exceptions and pockets of institutes — are woefully underskilled, even as more than 50% of our gross domestic product (GDP) is nowadays derived from services, a far easier proposition in terms of work than being a maker of things.

Thus, we have the well-documented lament of Indian industry that most graduates hired have to be trained to be able to deliver on the job expected of them and thus we are living with jobless growth.

As a brash youngster, a decade ago, whenever I heard a business magnate says, ‘I have a job, but no right candidate’, I felt unexplained anger. Now, after a decade of work experience, I know and feel the truth of the statement and want to change the way we LEARN. Most people put earn before learn and the problem begins.

SOME CHEER

After the troubling bit, it is also important to refer to the relatively cheery part for people, who actually are able to spot the EARNING in learning. The Punjab government has announced that it will be hiring more than 1 lakh people in all 41 of its departments to fill vacancies, over the next year or so.

The first surprising bit about the news is that almost all of these are vacancies. One wonders how the state has been functioning with almost 1 lakh people, who should have been serving the state’s residents, simply not being there. One also realises that the power sector alone -- a resource that the state claims to be surplus in -- will be getting 39,821 employees.

This is a figure that certainly had my brain fuse wanting to explode. It will certainly be news when the process to fill these vacancies is actually announced or made public, even as some exams are already on.

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