Meeting Malvika Grover from National Skill Development Corporation

This week I meet in person Malvika Grover, who is Analyst Programe Development at National Skill Development Corporation of India. This organization is an government initiative under the PM’s National Council of Skill Development is mandated to skill 30% of the overall target of 500 million by 2022.

Malvika visited these days Frankfurt am Main, which hosts a business community “Little India on Main”. This community boundless companies from IT and software industry through banks and airlines all the way to restaurants and clothes shops. Frankfurt plays a role of a gateway to continental Europe for almost all key players of the Indian high-tech, outsourcing, software and ICT industries. The relations between Frankfurt and Indian business delegations have been well-maintained for many years.

More about this community can be found here:

http://www.frankfurt-business.net/de/standortfrankfurt-de/business-communites-de/indien-de.html
http://www.frm-united.com/wirtschaftsstandort-frankfurtrheinmain/internationale-communities/indien.html

I had a  a nice opportunity as something like Information Technology representative of Chamber of Commerce to talk to Malvika about education. As Docent on University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional I do lot for education in this technology area in communities, etc. I strongly believe that education in IT is still behind extremely fast innovation cycle and we need  to change (massively improve) things. We talked lot of about education in India and Germany and tried to creatively generate few ideas to improve education.

My few toughs:

With a huge respect I appreciate many good projects on universities across the world, but unfortunately I still figure out, that in most education institutions students are not well prepared for software development and Information technology.
Here is a nice example.

 If You learn programming (or similar) and have to pass examination printed out on the peace of paper, You have already failed.

By changing of only this simple rule, we could improve massively the education in IT. I know, it is easier to make such statement, than to  change it.

But I also know, that doing something wrong way is not the right way, even if there is not right now a better way on horizon.

We will start to change education when we realize and accept that the current system is not efficient one. Our whole civilization is changing every decade (at least) and business and industry demands are growing and growing. If the education system has a goal to prepare young people for business and industry, why speed of change of education system does not correlate to speed of change of its goals? Before I start to trust some political statement, I must notice that at some point of divergence between demands and system, the education as we know it will mathematically become unusable (even obsolete). 

Nerds would say “Paper does not compile well”.