Prepping for tomorrow
The angry tropes about millennial employees have suddenly multiplied. How many have you come across on social media in the last couple of weeks? Perhaps it merely reflects employers’ increased annoyance at being saddled with a cohort or two of employees who bear the acronym ‘millennial’.
Even worse, maybe it represents a stealth marketing campaign by somebody about to con kids (more often their desperate parents) by launching a new training programme for millennials who want to hold onto a job.
In any event, it is also a cry for help that the kind of top management talent we need in India is simply not available and doesn’t look like it’s going to magically appear in the future.
There is no denying that we are facing a serious problem. As someone who has worked with a massive national team of over 400 top-quality professionals, whose skills were the basis of the corporate offering that we provided to more than 600 clients at a time, the sad choices are already visible.
In the process of interviewing more than 100 new middle- and top-level professionals every year to adjust both for the usual attrition in our business as well as to prepare for the growth that we are riding, I’ve had the advantage of leading a shark tank of potential employers, all hoping to pick and choose from the best of the pack. I can attest to the fact that even the pick of the litter is definitely inadequate to meet the needs of the future.
The managers of tomorrow are built from the interns of today, but even if one goes far above the intern level, the cracks in the availability pool are draining the efforts of everyone in top management, as they attempt to ramp up for growth or even just survival in a world that is more competitive by the day.
Can industry try to develop or train these emerging millennial cohorts to become the managers of the future in order to create the workforce that industry will require in the future that we are expected to create?
There are the shiny new schemes in the Budget that seem designed to ensure that new internships by the top companies in each sector will provide that holding pattern that the youth seem to want and need before they can land safely into the serious business of being in a job. Yes, in any job.
Coercion can be effective in some situations, but cooperation from the target group is a simple prerequisite to ensure that these kinds of shiny things last. Whether this will help the companies being bullied into doing so is a question that no one appears to be addressing.
The answer seems to be a resounding no if you bother to listen to the people doing the hiring and doing the paying. So, the tropes have it. Yea, the tropes have it.
Speaking to a range of industries beyond services and deep into India’s badlands of manufacturing, I can vouch that the costs of doing this are far higher than any compensation provided by the government. No one is complaining because nobody is listening.
There simply isn’t enough middle and top management who are trained and ready to take on positions that are empty at the moment.
But in the short run, when you have intern programmes of this size being thrust on you and therefore, being run, there is simply not enough production-line space, management bandwidth, or even staff facilities for attempting to get, alongside these Sarkari-mehmans, the kind of top-quality talent that you hope will actually stay with you in the long run.
I am not trying to duck the query as to whether industry is preparing enough by way of top management, as I analyse the problems at the bottom. Millennials will inevitably have to be the managers of tomorrow, and unless they can cope with the simple exigencies of the workplace, they will neither be able to survive nor rise to the C-suite.
Given the rise of AI and the multiplication of competitive pressures on most companies, they usually just don’t have it in them to be competent trainers of top management. Most companies look outside for this at the moment; despite the massive levels of white-collar, grey-hair unemployment that are underreported, there are just not enough good people who make the cut.
Besides, you also have to cope with the fact that today most large companies have very weak in-house training and skill assessment teams because much of it is outsourced simply on considerations of cost.
So, what are we going to do anyway while other countries have resorted to allowing super-skilled citizens from elsewhere to migrate? India doesn’t have that option.
One option that does exist is to try and attract back some of the better-skilled professionals who chose to leave many years ago. With the growth that we are currently clocking, this economy is attractive enough to make them consider relocating.
Besides that, I think the only option that exists is to harness our overcapacity in B-Schools to try and devise programmes and courses that can be done cheaply and flexibly for companies and willing millennials to impart the skill sets that are necessary to become the managers of tomorrow.