31/10/2015 Talking Business

Now on BBC News it's Talking Business.

Hello, I'm in Mumbai, the economic capital of India, country with a

conundrum, every month the medium people come onto the jobs market

here, but employers complain they can't find people with the skills

they need, so what is going wrong and what can be done about it? That

is what we are discussing on this weeks Talking Business.

A couple of months ago India's Prime Minister launched an initiative

called Skills India, with one clear ambition, to make hundreds of

millions of Indians more employable. It is an enormous problem, it is

estimated that fewer than 5% of India's 487 million workforce have

received formal skills training, and in other countries that figure is

closer to 60% and youth unemployment in India is high at 12.9%. In the

programme's first year the government hopes to provide skills

to 2.4 million young people and in the long-term these Skills India

mission hopes to give 3 million Indians with practical skills by

2022. The problem is so bad that one industry boss recently said India

doesn't have an unemployment problem, it has an umpire billeted

problem, and to discuss some of these issues we are at the

University which has causes ranging from engineering, architecture,

business management, to name a few, and later on we will talk to some

students, but before that we can meet our panel. The Abbey managing

director of an engineering company -- we have. And the chief executive

of our -- and IT training funds. Do you agree with that? India does have

an unemployable problem, and I think there is a lot of people like us who

want to hire workers and staff, but we don't have the right candidates.

Is that when you have companies coming to you looking for the right

people, is it very often that you find this massive mismatch, because

people graduating to not really fit into the job profile that companies

have? Yes and no. To a large extent, there are company expectations which

are very specific, and there is talent which is also very specific,

and they do not always meet. It is about the economy being slightly

polarise, there are aspects which do very well, the business

intelligence, for example, and sales and marketing, and there is another

side of the economy which is lacking. That is where you have

the other side you have less apply the other side you have less apply

and that is where you have more expensive talent and sometimes no

talent at all. Why is that happening? You have a massive

population, great young population. Everyone talks about what they read

opportunity this is for India, but we are not utilising that. There is

a lot of sense to this problem, of why this problem has arisen. One,

quality of education training, two, I would there to say, and the

robust policy of engaging with robust policy of engaging with

economics and also internships. In many countries, 90% of kids do some

vocational training, internships. The percentage in India is in single

digits. And then we have the bomber with teachers and trainings. We need

to million trainers by the year 2020. You have three factories, you

employ around 100 engineers who have gone through a four-year course.

When you recruit them, can you put them on the job directly? No, we

can't, and I will go back to what I said about unemployable ante, we

have the issue with engineers who do not want to work on the shop floor

and they don't want to blacken their hands. They want to work in the

office and they want to push papers, but we don't have the issue with the

blue-collar, because they want a job and they want a secure job and they

want to work. And a salary. We have this issue of engineers not really

coming onto the shop floor, so that is an issue. Do you think people

that are graduating from their degree courses have unrealistic

expectations? I think they do. There is a lot of internet and information

available, and there are aspirations which are sky high, but I don't know

if the attitude is a measure. We are OK with employing rural India which

has normal aspirations and let India be hired by these white-collar IT

guys. This is the aspiration of a country where you want jobs for

everyone, but there is the aspiration of the young generation,

they don't seem to match. Culprits are not able to -- if culprits are

not able to match aspirations, we are not fulfilling our duty and we

will not get the best of talents. The best of talent wants to join the

new age economy, that is the aspiration, and if you are not in

that space the other companies have got to create an environment which

somehow matches and closes the gap between the aspiration and the

reality. Is industry doing enough to solve this? Yes, the government has

a role, and must play a role, but at the end of the day, private industry

also needs to get involved, is it doing enough at the moment? Now I

will say yes and no. The large corporations are growing, a

motorcycle manufacturer can increase their production three times and not

have any net new employment, why? Because of outsourcing and

automation inside, because they are have very smart kids doing that for

them. It is the small, medium industries which are to take on the

slack in the way they do that, we have people who are contract

labourers and that means we do not have any commitment to their job

skills and we are not able to train them and we just use them as

Labour's, as hands. I don't think we are doing enough, but that is the

chain that is developed. I want to give you an example of the armed

services in India, they do a great job, taking first graduates, they

well oiled machine, with investment and investment and time and money.

That is an extreme, I don't think every industry can dedicate that

much time, but that is a fantastic example of how an organisation as

the commitment to really take a person and make him or herself ready

for the job. I want to get the students in, because we are talking

about all of these people, undergoing some kind of course, a

degree course, they will get a professional qualification. What

issue experience? When you are doing your education? Do you fear that

there is a mismatch with what you will go out and do in the industry?

I would say there is not exactly a mismatch, but I would say it is too

focused. We are always in a pharmacy, I'm in a pharmacy course,

and we are talking about corporate and we are talking about corporate

's, but pharmacy is a sector, it is health care, hospitals, it is

community and much more than what we are drilled about. You are doing a

management degree in technical management, do you find enough

industry interaction in the course that you are doing? Personally I did

and I did civil engineering in the Indian industry, many students do

not have the initiatives and the attitude to go out into the industry

and do internships, they could get hands-on expense about what is

happening at the ground level, that is what we should look for. Do we

need a radical change in the education system? The education

system works very well, but what we don't have is the diversity that is

needed in the education system and we don't have enough liberal arts

colleges. We are very excited by the fact that we have 80% of our young

population wanting to be engineers, and that's a nice thing on the 1

hand, but is that a great thing on the other? So many other industries

and sectors are booming, and India is a very diverse country in terms

of the economy in that sense. Can we have more diversity and multiplicity

in what we are teaching our children? That is a bigger question.

Can we see value in that kind of saint? It could be a future

potential employee. There is changing, changing mat more rapidly

than I thought, five years back, the way we looked at in terms, it was

bring some coffee and lick some stamps, but that has changed. Many

companies looked at in terms for the best new ideas, and so there are

examples of top industrials who have a great idea from an intern. They

have access to information just like I have, and it is not as though I'm

making a decision based on information which they don't have

access to. Actually, in our office, we take in terms, because we think

they will come up with bright ideas we have not thought of. Do you take

interns at your factory? We do take some, but not enough. We Ray small

medium enterprise, and the owner, me, is busy managing day-to-day, but

we would like the university to come and talk to us about what the

interns, who they concern, and the safety issues and the payment

issues. We have signed a memorandum of understanding with the

University, which will be operationalised about exchanging

their faculty coming to us and also we becoming part of the curriculum

and internship, but this is not enough. I'm an enlightened owner,

but we can do more, we are not doing enough. Thanks for that, we are here

at the University in Mumbai, and studying here is not something

everyone wants to do, and many of India's developer will depend on

manual or blue-collar jobs, so we have been to meet some of the people

looking for exactly that kind of work and asking them what struggles

they are facing. Across India, this is a very common sight, people,

mainly men, but some women, as welcome awaiting in spots around the

cities, looking for work. Commonly known as daily wage workers, they

are most likely to find labouring jobs or painting, tiling, basic

carpentry, and hey, if you have much training. TRANSLATION: We learn from

the seniors on the job, training will make a big difference for us.

We were never made aware of getting trained in what we do, and we have

just never met anyone who would enlighten us with training. I never

got any training, I've been working as a helping construction for the

past ten years, sometimes I get work and sometimes there are no jobs. I

would like to be trained as that would increase my income. There is

no consistency in getting daily jobs, we work two days and then the

next two days we are at home. I earn from setting ceramic tiles in

building constructions and sometimes I do cleaning jobs, as well, we can

earn only from these jobs, on days when we have work we earn in cash,

and when we don't get work, we return home. We've had some voices

there from the streets of Mumbai, and we know you run three factories,

do you get people who are skilled question what do you have to invest

time and money into getting somebody in and then training them on the

shop floor? This is blue-collar workers. We don't get people who ask

ill, we will have to invest time and money to get them trained, and we do

that quite well, we have what is called a mentor who takes a trainee

or a fresh worker who has probably never been to a factory before, he

might have come from an agricultural background, but he wants a job and

he wants to stick to that job and have upon the job. We are OK with

that. We wish he had skills, but we don't get them. An important

question I want to raise, what is the pay scale difference between

someone who is a fresh graduate or and someone who has done a more

vocational training course and is then working on a factory shop

floor? Or doing something which requires proper skills? We are in a

tear to city and a fresh graduate, engineer, we would pay around $200,

a bit less, and a worker we would pay around $150, so there is not

that much difference, if you take 20%, but that is big enough for

them. The chances of increment for a worker would be as per the wage

agreements, and a casual worker would not be part of the agreement.

An engineer could rise depending on their performance pretty soon, or

stay middling and then look for a new job. Where is the problem? Too

few training schools? And that is why factories like yours find it

difficult to find people to work? Or is it because people who can get

into those training schools do not prefer to go there as they want to

wear a nice shirt and work in a given environment question not there

are enough training institutes but the problem is of quality of

training, and that is connected to the shortage of teachers, and to my

mind that can be solved partly by the use of technology. That is a

circle which does get complete. In terms of the entry-level salaries,

which you are discussing, those have not increased in the large 3-5

years. Mainly due to cost pressure in the industry, so many people

chasing a few jobs. One simple statistic, a few months back, the

state government advertised for 647 openings, for a runner, someone just

picking up documents, and 1.2 million people applied for that. Why

is that question not it is quite aspirational to be part of the

government for those people. Is there a severe lack of training

schools? Statistics are quite poor, there are apparently enough trading

schools to train only 1.3 million people and we are talking about 12

or 13 million people joining the workforce every year, so that is a

gap of what it should be. I think there could be more training

institutes, and going back to the polarised economy and the fact that

we have so many different sectors within the country. There could be

more training institutes in certain sectors and we have, as he said,

many schools and engineering colleges, but there are other

things, as well. The number of design schools that we have in

India, for example, if you do not go to blue-collar, you have a lot of

gaps in those areas and I think programmes, for example, that we

spoke about earlier, the Skills India programme, we have a skills

university that is going anywhere from a politician to a plumber, and

for the grey collar worker that is an excellent platform to build out

skills and training, and then you distribute it in the Ramon areas of

the country, where jobs are of different kinds and you don't have

the right training in those areas. Some of the people we spoke to in

Mumbai, they said that it was an economic thing, they did not have

the money to put themselves through training schools. How do we solve

that problem? Clearly there are people that want these jobs, but

there are factories which are not able to find the right people.

Financing, let's say $200 for a folk Asian or education, sometimes that

is not possible, and India is a blackguard in terms of education

finance. Any kids wanting to get finance for their education, they

have got to give collaterals. Let's say mum or dad does not have

collaterals, she cannot get education, but why should that be

so? Any circumstances under which she would not mind working with your

hands? How can the industry attract you to those kind of jobs question

mark at the beginning of year we had a start-up, talking about that and

they would speak about how they would give independence to anyone

who came in to make decisions, to pick up things and analyse stuff, go

out in the market, and then make decisions on themselves, that is

very important for us. When we go into a new company, they sort of rob

you of your independent thought process. It is very difficult to

then fit into that and then move ahead. It is the reality. If the

start-up will be a bit different, give me a empowerment to do the

stuff that will make a difference. The manufacturing we don't need too

many people that are thinking new stuff, we want them to run the

machines, so we'll are OK with agricultural people -- we are OK.

The bus Wood boss tells you to do this, so do this, we have got to

beat the Chinese, right question we don't want entrepreneurs and

start-up. You need both of them, you need people that can work in large

conglomerates and actually do something that is new and completely

ground-breaking, and you also need the newer businesses and the reasons

is macro who can differently and do things unshackled, as it might be,

but there is no right or wrong, it is not one or the other. Everything

coexists and in India we are very lucky that they both coexist. Thanks

for being with us. That is almost it in Mumbai, but over the past seven

weeks we have looked at a variety of topics and Talking Business from all

over the world, and here is our consultant taking a look at what he

has found. As usual, I'm here in Dublin, and it can always be

difficult to distil huge questions of global business into three-minute

bite-size chunks, so I've turned to the master of verbal distillation,

Dublin born author Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde is one of the most

quotable and quoted writers in the English-language. Here are some of

his best ones. There's only one thing in the world worse than being

talked about, and that is not being talked about. Nothing that is worth

knowing can be taught. My favourite quote, is not written here, and that

is, it is a very sad thing nowadays that there is so little useless

information. I'm hoping to prove here are some of the bits of

information I've learned. The robots are coming for your job, but

thankfully not my job, but whether or not you like robotic co-workers

depends on how lifelike they look. If you take a robot and you make it

look more humanlike humans react better all the time. They have a

warm fuzzy feeling about the robot, and then it gets to a point where it

is quite likely human. And that totally reverses and you feel creeps

up by it. Depending on who you talk to, the

global economy might be heading for China get on. China is slowing down

very quickly, and in Ireland we noticed that, when you slow down

from a high growth rate used low down very quickly and you to hit a

wall and I think China will go into a massive recession. We found out

how something can change the gender balance in the tech business. The

tech sector have a light bulb moment where they have got together

collectively with senior people to say this is not working and this is

not OK, and they are missing out on a pool of talent because they are

not encouraging women to progress in careers in technology. What do

stallions have in common with discarded fire hoses? It turns out,

they both make unexpected exports. Who is this? This is the most

lucrative standing wave ever had, we like to think that the thoroughbred

is the Ferrari of Ireland. In 2005 we discovered that the fire hose was

going to land when it was no longer fit for purpose, and fast that was

insane, because this is a beautiful red material and we thought we have

got to rescue that. They say that travel broadens the mind. But to be

honest, I've managed to get away with broadening my mind slightly, by

just pretending to travel. But do you know something? The biggest

lesson I've learned in making these talking points, is that it is

possible to learn a lot about the global economy without straying very

far from my home in Ireland. It turns out that when you are talking

business, one country's business is everyone's business. Typically

sideways look at business from our comedy consultant, and that is it

from, here in Mumbai. Talking Business is taking a break but we

will be back at the start of the New Year. So from me and the Talking

Business team around the world, thanks for watching. Goodbye.