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Hyderabad: The ongoing ‘Business Policy Dialogue’ of Indian School of Business focused its recent session on the topic of future ready workforce. The engaging discussion was attended by Navin Mittal, Commissioner of College and Technical Education, Government of Telangana and Professor Chandrasekhar Sripada, Professor of Organisational Behavior (Practice) at ISB.

The two experts pointed out that having a future ready workforce and educating them with new age skills go hand-in-hand. However, the primary requirement is probably to ensure a lower drop out rate and nurturing those minds who have interest in learning new age skills and tools to join a future-ready workforce.

“In last three years we focused on 131 colleges with outdated syllabus and subject combinations. We restructured those and allowed students to take different combinations even out of their major specialisations. With the restructuring and greater flexibility to chose subjects we witnessed a 42% growth in admissions after the first year, and this year the growth in admissions crossed 61%,” said Commissioner Mittal, during the event’s online broadcast.

He said that the degree colleges in the state recorded an improvement in employment of their students following these changes. Going ahead the state is likely to produce more employable engineers and a workforce that can gear up to the changing business dynamics.

While learning does meet the information gap, it is no one way street. “The future-ready workforce should know what to do with the information they possess. To make student’s learning inquisitive is the aim of the new age teacher. It is very important to build connect or collaboration between the classroom and the real world, to have a future ready workforce,” said Professor Sripada, sharing his views on how to prep a future-ready workforce.

Among other thoughts that emerged out of this discussion are ideas like making education enquiry based, action centric, life skill-centric, and with extensive use of digital media. “Life skills and societal skills must be combined with education to have not just employable but better human being in the society,” said Professor Sripada, after both the speakers agreed on the need to set the goal for having a better society alongside having a future-ready workforce.

Catch this interesting dialogue for interesting insights here.