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2011年 04月 07日 07:17
印度：大學畢業生多 適合錄用者少
經
營呼叫中心的印度公司24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd.正在急切招募那些能通過電話或電子郵件回答客戶問題的新員工。它想今年招到3,000人。但在印度這個擁有12億人口的國家﹐這卻像是一個不可能完成的任務。
Vivek M. for The Wall Street Journal
圖為印度公司24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd.的應聘者。每100名向24/7 Customer提交求職申請的人中﹐達到該公司錄用標準的只有三個人。
印度一直有著這樣的國家形象：每年“出產”數十萬名受過良好教育的學生﹐他們對西方薪資更高的中產階級雇工構成越來越大的威脅。美國總統奧巴馬(Barack Obama)曾將印度學生的數學能力稱作美國面臨競爭性挑戰的一個原因。
然而24/7 Customer的經歷卻揭示了一個與上述形象大相徑庭的印度。由於在印度招到合格的員工越來越難﹐這家公司不得不將招募範圍擴大到菲律賓和尼加拉瓜。其8,000名員工目前絕大部分都在印度以外工作。
“離岸外包”這個詞因印度而變得家喻戶曉﹐然而24/7本身卻因缺乏人手而不得不將業務安排到海外。
這家公司的創始人納賈拉簡(S. Nagarajan)說﹐憑印度的人口規模﹐招募員工本來應該容易得多﹐相反我們卻在仔細搜尋所有的角角落落。
印度的經濟擴張本應讓千百萬人得以有機會擺脫貧困、接受教育並找到不錯的工作。但1991年印度在實行數十年的社會主義制度後開始進行經濟自由化時﹐卻未能改革受到嚴重束縛的教育體系。
商界管理人士說﹐學校受到專橫的官僚主義阻礙﹐同時只注重機械性的學習﹐而不重視培養學生的批判性思維和理解能力。政府保證了學費的低廉﹐令更多的學生得以上學﹐但同時教師薪資和教育預算水平也很低。教育界人士和商界領袖還說﹐大多數地方的課程都已過時﹐與現實社會脫節。
新德里人力資源公司NIIT Ltd. India的首席執行長塔塔尼(Vijay Thadani)說﹐微薪養蠢才。這家公司還針對缺乏相關技能、難以找到好工作的大學畢業生開展職業培訓。
令 形勢更為複雜的是﹐表面上看印度大學畢業生的數量有了極大增長﹐似乎已經滿足了對更高教育程度工人的需求。行業組織印度全國軟件和服務企業協會 (National Association of Software and Services Companies)的數據顯示﹐印度工科院校目前可容納150萬名學生﹐差不多相當於2000年時39萬人的四倍。
但印度全國軟件和服務企業協會進行的評估測試顯示﹐75%的專科畢業生和85%以上的綜合性大學畢業生都無法受雇於印度高增長的全球性行業﹐如信息技術（IT）企業和呼叫中心。
致力於提高窮人教育水平的非政府組織Pratham每年都對印度1.3萬所小學的教學質量進行調查﹐結果發現印度大約一半的五年級學生沒有達到二年級的閱讀水平。
這種情況將威脅到印度保持經濟增長、同時維護其經商環境低成本優勢的能力。印度經濟今年預計將增長9%。
考 慮到印度人口比美國、歐洲和中國更為年輕化﹐這種挑戰尤其顯得緊迫。據印度政府估計﹐印度一半以上人口的年齡在25歲以下﹐未來10年預計每個月會有 100萬人加入求職者行列。令人擔憂的是﹐如果這些年輕人未能接受足夠的訓練﹐無法分享印度引人注目的新經濟成果﹐他們可能對印度的穩定造成威脅。
班加羅爾的人力資源招聘和培訓公司Teamlease Services Ltd.的董事總經理薩巴哈瓦爾(Manish Sabharwal)說﹐經濟改革的意義不在於土大款能一擲千金買奔馳轎車。如果我們不能讓下一代找到工作﹐20年的改革就一文不值。
然而在政府和商界領導人承認勞動力短缺之際﹐教育改革卻遠未得到立法保障。舉例來說﹐一項讓學校在設計課程方面擁有更大自主權的法案預計將於未來幾週在內閣進行討論﹐今年晚些時候才會提交國會。
23 歲的辛格(Pradeep Singh)是去年從RKDF College of Engineering畢業的。該校是博帕爾市(Bhopal)最古老的工程學院之一。辛格說﹐我對找工作根本毫無準備。他已經參加過五次面試﹐沒有一次 成功找到工作。為了增加自己對潛在雇主的吸引力﹐他參加了NIIT舉辦的為期五個月的電腦編程課。
辛格及其他數名工程專業畢業生說﹐他們很快就知道有些課不必費勁去上。辛格說﹐老師很隨便﹐學生也很隨便﹐好像他們都一致認為不用太操心。他說﹐他每周都要翹幾天的課﹐期末只要花上三、四天時間臨時抱抱佛腳考試就能過關。
其他人說﹐作弊（通常與閱卷老師合謀）現象非常普遍。現年26歲的沙瑪(Deepak Sharma)就讀德里市外的頂尖工程學院ITM University時﹐有好幾次考試都沒過﹐直到他終於發現了竅門：在考卷上寫上他的手機號碼。
他在計算理論課考試中就是這麼做的。他說﹐不久後﹐閱卷老師就打電話給他﹐說如果他和朋友每人交一萬盧比（約合250美元）﹐就讓他們過關。他和另外四個朋友湊了錢﹐他們都通過了考試。
沙瑪說﹐我幾乎可以百分之百的肯定﹐如果我沒有交錢的話﹐我考試肯定還會不及格。
ITM University的副校長納卡拉(BC Nakra)在接受採訪時說﹐他們學校沒有作弊問題﹐如果有人被發現作弊﹐是會坐牢的。他說﹐自己在報紙上看到過一兩起作弊事件﹐在極少極少的情況下﹐有 些地方可能有人作弊﹐如果夸大作弊問題﹐會影響整個社會。記者無法找到閱卷老師置評。
Wipro Technologies的人力資源高級副總裁高維爾(Saurabh Govil)說﹐除了要解決作弊問題外﹐印度教育制度還需要把整個方向轉到以學習為重點上。按銷量計算﹐Wipro是印度第三大軟件出口商。該公司說﹐難 以找到熟練工人。高維爾說﹐你如何才能改變知識只是一紙文憑這一思維模式？這是個大問題。
不久前一個下午在24/7 Customer的員工招募中心﹐有40個人正在滿是帶靠背座椅的大廳內填寫表格。而在一個有著玻璃牆的會議室里﹐一位負責人力資源事務的公司管理人士正在同時面試七位求職者。其中六人是不久前剛畢業的大學生﹐其中一人說他讀的是通信專業學位。
這些人一個接一個地用磕磕絆絆的英語作著自我介紹。面試官打斷了一名年青男子的話語﹐說他講得太快了﹐人們難以聽清他在說些什麼。這個年青人被告知要讓自己平靜下來﹐再重新講一遍。他試著再說一次﹐可語速仍然是那麼快﹐第一輪面試後他就被淘汰了。
另 一位名叫庫馬爾(Rajan Kumar)的應聘者說﹐幾年前他獲得了工程學方面的學士學位。他說﹐自己的業餘愛好是看板球賽﹐他的強項是守時。面試官指出了他擁有工程學學位這一事實 ﹐然後問他為何想在科技行業得到一份工作。庫馬爾回答說﹐他正好趕上了。面試官不認為這是個合適的回答﹐庫馬爾也被淘汰。
還有一位名叫達 什(Chaudhury Laxmikant Dash)的22歲男性應聘者﹐他去年畢業﹐也擁有工程學學士學位。達什說﹐自己是電視有獎競猜遊戲節目的獲勝者﹐他的業餘愛好是去國外旅行。但在面試官 的追問下達什承認﹐直到現在他還沒有旅行過。不過他還是與其他兩人通過了首輪面試﹐這兩人一男一女﹐男子在填寫應聘表時只寫上了一個名字──魯賓遜 (Robinson)。
初試過關者的下一道挑戰是在一分鐘內打出25個單詞。女性應聘者打滿一頁紙後被告知﹐她打字的速度太慢﹐每分鐘只能打18個詞。達什用盡渾身力氣去打字﹐汗都流出來了﹐但他兩次嘗試都未能達標。
只有魯賓遜闖過了第二輪考試﹐第三輪考試的測試題是閱讀理解一段有關核戰爭的文字﹐這段文字後面附有三道多項選擇題。魯賓遜只是兩眼直呆呆盯著電腦屏幕。由於他們未能通過閱讀理解考試﹐同一批進去面試的這七個人全遭淘汰。
在24/7 Customer公司負責為印度業務招聘員工的希拉達(Satya Sai Sylada)說﹐印度一般大學畢業生的閱讀理解和對話能力非常低﹐這是我們面臨的最大挑戰。
Geeta Anand
India Graduates Millions, But Too Few Are Fit To Hire
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.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.
In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore.
'With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees,' says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. 'Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny.'
India's economic expansion was supposed to create opportunities for millions to rise out of poverty, get an education and land good jobs. But as India liberalized its economy starting in 1991 after decades of socialism, it failed to reform its heavily regulated education system.
Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.
'If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys,' says Vijay Thadani, chief executive of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.
Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.
But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.
Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.
At stake is India's ability to sustain growth─its economy is projected to expand 9% this year─while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.
The challenge is especially pressing given the country's more youthful population than the U.S., Europe and China. More than half of India's population is under the age of 25, and one million people a month are expected to seek to join the labor force here over the next decade, the Indian government estimates. The fear is that if these young people aren't trained well enough to participate in the country's glittering new economy, they pose a potential threat to India's stability.
'Economic reforms are not about goofy rich guys buying Mercedes cars,' says Manish Sabharwal, managing director of Teamlease Services Ltd., an employee recruitment and training firm in Bangalore. 'Twenty years of reforms are worth nothing if we can't get our kids into jobs.'
Yet even as the government and business leaders acknowledge the labor shortage, educational reforms are a long way from becoming law. A bill that gives schools more autonomy to design their own curriculum, for example, is expected to be introduced in the cabinet in the next few weeks, and in parliament later this year.
I was not prepared at all to get a job,' says Pradeep Singh, 23, who graduated last year from RKDF College of Engineering, one of the city of Bhopal's oldest engineering schools. He has been on five job interviews─none of which led to work. To make himself more attractive to potential employers, he has enrolled in a five-month-long computer programming course run by NIIT.
Mr. Singh and several other engineering graduates said they learned quickly that they needn't bother to go to some classes. 'The faculty take it very casually, and the students take it very casually, like they've all agreed not to be bothered too much,' Mr. Singh says. He says he routinely missed a couple of days of classes a week, and it took just three or four days of cramming from the textbook at the end of the semester to pass the exams.
Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant. Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick: Writing his mobile number on the exam paper.
That's what he did for a theory-of-computation exam, and shortly after, he says the examiner called him and offered to pass him and his friends if they paid 10,000 rupees each, about $250. He and four friends pulled together the money, and they all passed the test.
'I feel almost 99% certain that if I didn't pay the money, I would have failed the exam again,' says Mr. Sharma.
BC Nakra, Pro Vice Chancellor of ITM University, where Mr. Sharma studied, said in an interview that there is no cheating at his school, and that if anyone were spotted cheating in this way, he would be 'behind bars.' He said he had read about a case or two in the newspaper, and in the 'rarest of the rare cases, it might happen somewhere, and if you blow [it] out of all proportions, it effects the entire community.' The examiner couldn't be located for comment.
Cheating aside, the Indian education system needs to change its entire orientation to focus on learning, says Saurabh Govil, senior vice president in human resources at Wipro Technologies. Wipro, India's third largest software exporter by sales, says it has struggled to find skilled workers. The problem, says Mr. Govil, is immense: 'How are you able to change the mind-set that knowledge is more than a stamp?'
At 24/7 Customer's recruiting center on a recent afternoon, 40 people were filling out forms in an interior lobby filled with bucket seats. In a glass-walled conference room, a human-resources executive interviewed a group of seven applicants. Six were recent college graduates, and one said he was enrolled in a correspondence degree program.
One by one, they delivered biographical monologues in halting English. The interviewer interrupted one young man who spoke so fast, it was hard to tell what he was saying. The young man was instructed to compose himself and start from the beginning. He tried again, speaking just as fast, and was rejected after the first round.
Another applicant, Rajan Kumar, said he earned a bachelor's degree in engineering a couple of years ago. His hobby is watching cricket, he said, and his strength is punctuality. The interviewer, noting his engineering degree, asked why he isn't trying to get a job in a technical field, to which he replied: 'Right now, I'm here.' This explanation was judged inadequate, and Mr. Kumar was eliminated, too.
A 22-year-old man named Chaudhury Laxmikant Dash, who graduated last year, also with a bachelor's in engineering, said he's a game-show winner whose hobby is international travel. But when probed by the interviewer, he conceded, 'Until now I have not traveled.' Still, he made it through the first-round interview, along with two others, a woman and a man who filled out his application with just one name, Robinson.
For their next challenge, they had to type 25 words a minute. The woman typed a page only to learn her pace was too slow at 18 words a minute. Mr. Dash, sweating and hunched over, couldn't get his score high enough, despite two attempts.
Only Mr. Robinson moved on to the third part of the test, featuring a single paragraph about nuclear war followed by three multiple-choice questions. Mr. Robinson stared at the screen, immobilized. With his failure to pass the comprehension section, the last of the original group of applicants was eliminated.
The average graduate's 'ability to comprehend and converse is very low,' says Satya Sai Sylada, 24/7 Customer's head of hiring for India. 'That's the biggest challenge we face.'
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