I was taking to an industry stalwart and he shared with me his latest experience.
For their expansion plan they were recruiting fresh engineering graduates and wanted the fresh entrants to start contributing in 3 months time.
His HR head put his foot down and said that minimum 6 months would be needed to train these people and be enlisted for the shop floor responsibilities. He found it ridiculous and questioned his HR head on why & what will be taught to these people in these 6 months. The HR head in his answer invited him to the interview that they had scheduled next week. He was perplexed to find that none of these people had ever worked on a manufacturing industry shop floor. HR head then explained that fresh engineering graduates are indeed fresh and are even unaware of the basics of the manufacturing industries.
What my friend shared with me was something that we all know about. But this interaction forced me to think as to what we can do as a training organization to contribute to the solution of my friend’s (& almost everybody else’s) problem. On my return our team had a brain storming and we came up with the following points;
It is imperative that some time & effort is spent in inducting a new entrant to any industry. This would be needed for a person to get acclimatised to the organisation’s culture, technology, product & systems. However we can definitely contribute in reducing the 5 gaps.
What are these 5 gaps?
Technology Gap
It could require bridging the gap between academy and industry and we could facilitate industrial visits of engineering students to industries with modern technology.
Practical Gap
We could network with industries to allot specific projects to the students during their occasional trainings. These projects must help the host industry to solve their problem in order to become interested in hosting these students.
Infrastructure Gap
We can use our contents and facilities to independently run a pilot project so that neither the colleges nor the industry need to create the infrastructure.
Knowledge Gap
With wealth of knowledge accumulated through our work with leading industrial organization we could devote time to create training inputs that will valuable to the students and the industry.
Volume Gap
We being a small organization can definitely not handle the volume of students that may need these inputs. However we can always make a new beginning as a pilot project.
Our solution
Academic TQM course has been designed to overcome these 5 gaps. We worked up the following blue print for this new beginning.
We will enlist batches of students selected from the participating engineering colleges or, directly.
These students along with their semester based academic inputs will concurrently undergo TQM training with us.
Each year these students will be allotted projects in consultation with host industries under the guidance of our facilitators. Each of these projects will result in practical solution to the industry selected problems and practically implemented with demonstrated results.
We will keep a comprehensive record for each participating student of their performance in training & projects. This record along with their academic achievement would create a base for their eventual placements in the host industry or, other industries.
These small measures may not solve my friend’s problem but can definitely create a practical & scalable model to address such problems as a process.