By-Gopal Devanahalli   

In India, since Independence, the path towards securing a good job has been to get a college education. For several years, the most attractive jobs were in the government sector. But after the economic reforms of 1991, the private sector especially has created millions of jobs for college-educated Indians. All these years, the formula for a successful career has been simple, essentially comprising of three steps:

Get a degree from a reputed college where you learn concepts of your domain;

Join a company;

and Learn on the job!

In the information technology (IT) sector, there was an intermediate step—where engineers of all streams were taught to ‘code’ for 3-4 months after they joined the job.

Well, the above formula appears to be coming to an end. The first signs were visible in the IT sector—the changing technologies necessitated that a programmer had to keep getting re-skilled in newer technologies. But the interesting aspect is that the time to re-skill has been shrinking rapidly in the IT sector—NASSCOM, in May 2017, said that over 40% of the workforce (of 40 lakh) needs to get re-skilled in the next five years in areas like artificial intelligence and virtual reality to stay relevant.

This, however, is no longer restricted to the IT industry. Most industries and jobs are likely to get transformed very quickly over the next few years because of rapid advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, Internet of Things, genomics, blockchain, etc. Who would have imagined three years ago that self-driving cars would be on the roads or that drones would be used by Amazon for delivering packages? The exact impact of artificial intelligence on many industries is still unknown, but there is a consensus that the impact is going to be huge.

In such a scenario of rapid disruption, the nature of the jobs would keep changing and successful employees would be expected to adapt to newer types of jobs. What one has learnt in college may no longer be relevant. Today, major examples are in IT jobs—programmers have to re-skill themselves in R, Python or concepts like machine learning. At the same time, changes are already happening in other jobs. Some examples include:

Employees in marketing have to build expertise in digital marketing;

Customer support managers have to learn to use chatbots to service customers;

Doctors need artificial intelligence tools like Watson to treat patients better.

These changes are not going to be restricted to private sector—with the focus on Digital India, employees in the government sector will also need to re-skill themselves.

What is the new formula for a working professional to be successful? The answer is simple—being a lifelong learner. One needs to keep re-skilling oneself. It is also important that the individual takes accountability for one’s own learning and not depend on his/her employer for it. The good news is that the internet is making it easy for an individual to get re-skilled—the best quality of content can be accessed online at affordable prices, and one can learn at his/her own pace online. It is also important for individuals to work on their cognitive and behavioural skills and not just on their domain skills. In fact, creativity, curiosity and communication skills will be valued at a premium.

At the same time, it is imperative that college education in India is re-imagined. Students should be encouraged to learn different disciplines—natural sciences, social sciences, humanities. Colleges should also incorporate new technologies into their curriculum through online courses.

Whilst transforming college education maybe take a huge effort, transforming oneself to be a continuous learner is possible and the need of the hour.

The author is senior vice-president, Manipal Global Education Services