Tamil Nadu - Chennai   

`Introduce six sigma philosophy in education'

Universities should take an initiative to improve the employability of the thousands of graduates they churn out every year, HRD consultant K. Shankar tells M. Dinesh Varma.

The Six Sigma philosophy, which has worked wonders in an industrial environment, should be introduced in the higher education sector in the wake of disturbing reports about the quality of graduates, Mr. Shankar said.

He feels that the Six Sigma methodology (which helped Motorola attain a quality benchmark by cutting down defect levels to below 3.4 Defects Per Million Opportunities) will help institutions to initiate a paradigm shift in the way they are being administered.

Mr. Shankar says that only about 20 to 25 per cent of fresh graduates are employable.

In its much talked about report on the `Emerging Global Market', the Mckinsey Global Institute said that only 25 per cent of Indian engineers are actually employable.

According to Mr. Shankar, the issue in most engineering colleges primarily is that principals or deans are bogged down in administrative work giving them little time to pay attention to academic excellence.

He felt that heads of institutions and senior faculty members should focus only on gaining academic excellence, in terms of giving good teaching exposure to students, upgrading laboratory facilities, popularising application-oriented teaching in subjects, holding frequent interaction with students to evaluate their grasping power and exposing students to corporate expectations of technical, administrative and soft skills.

Continuous learning involves sharpening of skills by adapting and understanding new technologies and imperatives in the industry. However, training programmes are neither organised with care nor the feedback evaluated at the end, he feels.

Mr. Shankar also advocates more frequent industry-institution interaction. Such interaction was limited to the much pampered IT segment despite other domains of the industry performing remarkably well.

Industrial safety

On industrial safety, which is his principal area of interest, Mr. Shankar said, "Anticipation is the key to industrial safety management." Unfortunately, most enterprises give low priority to safety, he says.

Beyond fire fighting, whenever an accident takes place, the safety charter should be a "24/7 and 360 degree affair and involve both the employer and employee."

He also called for more Government-industry interaction to strike a balance between the developed and underdeveloped areas to avoid clustering in urban pockets and checking migration from rural areas.

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