Saturday, April 16, 2011
The American educational system can benefit from India Best Practices...
The American educational system is fundamentally busted. One idea that I would like to propose is to send 100,000 elementary and high school teachers to India to learn a few practices that Indian outsourcing firms leverage...
We need to rethink education completely. As it stands, vendors such as Cognizant, Wipro, Virtusa and so on based on sound margins from labor arbitrage found a way to retrain massively people from any career into relevant careers. They have found ways to sell deals to American CIOs without necessarily having the experience.
Independent of any competencies or lack of, they have figured out ways to train people in very cost effective ways. If a CIO wanted 10,000 people to be immediately trained up on the latest version of Java, the Indian firms have figured out how to at least get them to a level of proficiency (this is distinct from mastery) in a way that allows them to hit the deadlines.
While Americans are savagely focused on experience, India is busy giving freshers a chance. Governments and parents pony up dozens of thousands of dollars per child, and students are advised to focus on studying and not working, which has a high opportunity cost. What can we learn from India...
| | View blog reactionsWe need to rethink education completely. As it stands, vendors such as Cognizant, Wipro, Virtusa and so on based on sound margins from labor arbitrage found a way to retrain massively people from any career into relevant careers. They have found ways to sell deals to American CIOs without necessarily having the experience.
Independent of any competencies or lack of, they have figured out ways to train people in very cost effective ways. If a CIO wanted 10,000 people to be immediately trained up on the latest version of Java, the Indian firms have figured out how to at least get them to a level of proficiency (this is distinct from mastery) in a way that allows them to hit the deadlines.
While Americans are savagely focused on experience, India is busy giving freshers a chance. Governments and parents pony up dozens of thousands of dollars per child, and students are advised to focus on studying and not working, which has a high opportunity cost. What can we learn from India...
