While attending a course on Competency management, I came to realize how utterly irrelevant some our education streams have become. Especially the engineering streams that have produced an undifferentiated talent pool that call for a distinction based on marks procured.

What we produce in our Country are just Graduates, not engineers or physics graduates or mathematics graduates. Except for a few handful of cases where some good institutes produce some good talent, the rest of them are just one big employable bunch who can, irrespective of their specialization, be trained in a months time to unlearn some old and learn some new concepts and can then be put to work.

The graduates from different streams end up in cubicles next to each other, doing the same work and making the same career. Competency inventories administered in a class of 30 would-be HR managers throw up 2 who are suited for the profession. Most of them are making a career out of what they have got and are aspiring within the bounds of the plausible, and not based on Competencies thrown up by an inventory.

Such being the case, when companies decide to match the competencies of an induvidual with that of a job while hiring, what tends to happen is that these supposed misfits get either caught out with utter disregard to  what might have been potential that has been sacrificed at the altar of a competency model, or in some cases the they slip through only to lead a vegetable existence in organizations that have learnt to live with mediocrity.

The fallacy of the educational system is that competencies are considered at a much much later stage than appropriate. This situation has lead to the country loosing its multi faceted talent to a corporate world that is in turn stuck with an average workforce that wants to go home at 5 pm.