Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
That article is scary. That is the exact problem that I have read is behind the unrest in the Middle East. State-financed diploma mills have educated a generation of young Arabs who get a degree that is worthless in the global marketplace and now they’re mad as hell at the fact they can’t get work. God help India’s billion souls…
#1, I clicked to comment for the same reason you cite. In India and in Egypt, from my husband’s personal experience in manufacturing management in both countries, it’s not unusual at all to find people who are theoretically qualified but in fact can’t perform the work required. They spit back rote information on exams but they are not taught to think and reason. Also, real fluency and ease in English is less common than one might think. English is the language of international business.
Anecdotal reports related to the U.S. training of the Iranian armed forces under the Shah stated that they tended to depend on rote memorization in their education process and that this made it difficult to train them in analytic thinking.