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Certificates are valuable; showcasing your work is priceless!

Students pursue a University degree with the objective that they will get jobs. In reality any student who has earned a college degree is no different from 60 others in the same class. The only differentiator being the marks they have secured. Higher marks or scores help a student to be the first in line to attend an interview. Nothing more. With a vanilla college degree, getting a job in today’s market conditions is difficult. So, students take up some specialized skill courses from training institutes to earn a certificate. All students are required to execute a project in partial completion of the course and these projects are mostly generic in nature. Again, the students find themselves in a situation where their marks or grades are the only differentiator. Even after being certified, the students find themselves in the same situation that they were in right after they graduated. A decade or two ago certified professionals were few and jobs many. Certification in a certain skil...
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Talent based career selection

I see students today and their parents are excessively obsessed with marks. I am not saying marks are not important, they certainly are. But focusing only on marks is not going to get everyone everywhere. By concentrating on scores, most students might make it to their dream jobs. But then, at some point in future, these people will get to a point where they find themselves demotivated and lacking the drive to go on. Getting decent scores in your 10th and 12th grade is important. This is because the 10th grade is in fact an end to the first logical step in schooling. The 12th grade score lays the foundation for further education and eventually your career. Your marks do help in getting admission to a course of your choice. One thing that most students and their parents do is ignore Inborn Talent . Some skills come to children naturally. It is important that a student’s talent must not be ignored because building a skill-set on top of inborn talent will prove rewarding with the pass...
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Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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Course selection and career options

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Unlike a decade or two ago, students today are faced with multiple and diverse career options. These days the competition is very high and that is evident from the marks the students are scoring in the 10th and 12th Grade examinations. The toppers score is over 99% (various Education Boards in India).  The students who pass the the 12th-grade board examination can be classified under 3 bands with respect to the marks they score compared to the cut-off percentage for the course of their choice. STUDENT SCORE BANDS Top Band : Score is higher than Cut-off %. Middle Band : Score is in the vicinity of the Cut-off %. Bottom Band : Score is below the cut-off %. Students in the Top Band , don't have to worry too much about their career choices because they tend to get admission to the courses of their choice, whatever that may be.  For students in the Middle Band , owing to the extreme competition, there are a large number of students who are in the border-li...
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Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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An unconventional learning system!

We go through 15 years of schooling from Kindergarten to 12th Grade. Learning objectives of each grade are evaluated through periodic tests and assignments. Whether the learning objectives are met or not is determined by the grades a student earns at the end of each year. In each examination, the student must answer a set of questions. Each question bears a certain number of marks. If the student’s answer is right, she is awarded full marks, if the answer is partially correct or incomplete, the student is awarded a portion of marks equivalent to the correctness of the answer. Generalizing the conventional education system - typically every student starts with 100 marks in each examination. As and when a student makes an error, marks are deducted. The student’s final score or grade is what is left after deducting marks for wrong answers. The conventional evaluation system adopts a Top-Down approach to evaluate the student’s performance and has been working like this for decades. ...
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Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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How your Skill drives your Motivation at work!

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We all face motivation challenges at work from time to time. In my professional experience, 95% of the people I have come across have complained about low motivation levels at work. The situation has not changed much in the last 10 years and I am sure that there will be no change in the next 10 years if we don’t do anything about it. People who complain of low motivation levels at work can be broadly classified under two heads; Category 1 : Those who are working in their chosen jobs, doing what they love doing. Category 2 : Those who are working on jobs that are forced on to them (those who were unable to get the jobs they desired but eventually compromised to take up what was available) . The following argument holds good for those in Category 1. The argument also stands for Category 2, but only when the individual is willing to pursue their current career path and do well in the years ahead. Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychologist and distinguished Profess...
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Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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Talent: Overcoming the lack of Talent! (Post #4 of 4)

This is  Post # 4  from a Series of  4 Posts Previous post in the series :  Talent: Talent-based education system (Post #3 of 4) Let me tell you a story about one of my team members. We called him Ace! Ace had a degree in Computer Science and Engineering. He passed with average grades and had come to my organization to write an aptitude test in the computer language C. His performance in the aptitude test was not extraordinary, but he managed to scrape through. During his interview, I discovered that his communication skills were below average, but he demonstrated an exceptional attitude. Looking back, I think I hired Ace for his attitude more than his technical skills. Ace went through the Induction Program and was deployed to one of the projects. His performance assessment for the first, the second and the third year in the company was "Below Expectations". One thing that kept him from being fired was that he was a very hard worker. He would wal...
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Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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Talent: Talent-based education system (Post #3 of 4)

This is  Post # 3  from a Series of  4 Posts Previous post in the series :  Talent: Determining Talent (Post #2 of 4) The need of the hour is an Education System that focuses on the Talent!. For this, the system should do the following; Identify talents  in the students, early on. Explain the student's talent to the student's parents  first and get them onboard with the concept of talent and how it helps in the future. Determine ways to  nurture and develop the student's inborn talents . Determine and provide the options to move forward  (higher education, career etc.) The student's parents play a pivotal role in the whole process, so they must be involved from the beginning. If the parents are not on board with the idea, it is sure to fail. And, this must be an optional enrollment for the parents. If they are not convinced, there is no point for the teachers to bang their heads against a wall! Usually, the parents are driven b...
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Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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