We need critical thinkers

Updated on: Tuesday, June 14, 2011

The employee skills deficiency issue continues to plague companies in India today, casting a shadow on their growth and evolution. Since a NASSCOM survey, a few years ago, estimated that only 25% of engineering college graduates are immediately employable in the IT industry, much has been made of this glaring gap between what industry seeks in its employees and what it actually gets.

The focus, so far, has been on ramping up technical skills but the real need is to enhance certain broad-based skills that are outside the realm of textbooks. From our experience of recruiting fresh engineers and enabling them to work on client engagements through a residential programme, the skill gap falls into three main areas — critical thinking, communication, and the ability to function well as part of a team.

Think hard

Of these, critical thinking is probably the most important. A key requirement for effective problem-solving, it is defined as a type of higher order thinking that questions prevailing assumptions. Adept at logical reasoning, critical thinkers believe that there is more than one route to a desired outcome and they can leverage this flexible approach for optimal results. Companies value critical thinkers for what they bring to the table, namely, the ability to challenge the status quo, driving change and innovation in the process.

It is clear that critical thinking, as a collective skill, can be a company-building attribute, but it is one that many of today's college graduates lack. And if you take a closer look at how our education system works, it is easy to see why.

Concepts first

Our schools and colleges encourage rote learning by assessing students' ability to recollect definitions and explaining concepts rather than applying their knowledge to solve problems.

The number of times words like 'define,' 'describe' and 'explain' that occurs in a question paper demonstrates the focus of our assessments. In engineering colleges, for example, students commit a lot of theoretical concepts to memory without testing their limits or exploring their real-life applications.

Such an environment rarely fosters critical thinking or problem-solving skills, leaving students ill-equipped to face the challenges of the world outside the classroom. It is clear that there is a yawning gap in this area but the good news is that the situation can be remedied. Corporates can and should work more closely with colleges to restructure both curricula and classroom instruction. Faculty enablement will go a long way in transforming the teaching approach used in schools and colleges. Special workshops or programmes for students, if held on a regular basis, will also help to introduce a doze of working world reality into college campuses.

Encouraging students to participate in Global competitions like the ACM-ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest conducted by the Association for Computing Machinery) can go a long way in developing these skills in our students.

Comprehensive employee training programmes, with an emphasis on application and problem-solving, serve as the next level in the drive to build critical thinking skills. Using simulated scenarios and other training modules, employees can be pushed to think quickly and logically in order to come up with reasonable solutions for a given problem.

This combination of quality college-based initiatives and employee training programmes will work to shrink the current skill-deficit in this area and produce a breed of innovators and problem-solvers who are not afraid to push the boundaries at work. Sustainable employability demands sustained critical thinking and problem-solving abilities.

Times of India

We need critical thinkers

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