German Precision in HRD

There is a joke that goes around in Europe that a typical game of football is
one where twenty-two people kick the ball for around ninety minutes and at the
end of the game Germany wins! For any soccer fan, the truth of this statement
does not need to be reinforced with Germany pulling off narrow victories against
much fancied opponents time and again with their particular brand of efficiency
and precision in playing the game.

This is most apparent in the way the country has thought through its famous
dual system of vocational education, a process that we have much to learn from,
even as the Indian services industry faces the daunting prospect of preparing
eight to ten million skilled services professionals every year, with at least a
million of these in the IT and BPO sectors. Guided by the Vocational Training
Act created in 1969 and updated in 2005, the responsibility for creating talent
is shared by the firms, training schools, and young people, and administered by
the eighty Chambers of Commerce and Industry that have ensured its
implementation across all sectors of the German economy.

As in everything to do with Germany, the system permits adequate room for
innovation within a prescribed framework that has seen a national decree
established for every profession with over 350 training occupations recognised,
of which 250 are in the field of industry, trade, and services. The contents of
the educational curriculum, the apprenticeship in the industry, and the
intermediate and final examinations for each profession, have been specified
with more than 170,000 professionals working on an honorary basis in the
examination boards. With an investment of over
27 bn on vocational training with an average cost per trainee of nearly 18,000
per year, the country can be justifiably proud of the results they have
achieved. The training schools have been successful in building a high quality
standard and are now aligning with the European Qualifications Framework to
enable participants training in all parts of EU. Students see this stream as a
high reward process that provides them monetary independence at an early age and
the government itself is providing its full backing because of the inherent
employment and social benefits that have already begun to show results for the
German economy.

The IT training streams in vocational education have a lot in parallel to the
formal system in India. And indeed the yeoman efforts undertaken by Aptech and
NIIT in the early years of the private sector participation in IT training with
basic IT operator courses having been enhanced to enable specialist professions
like application development, systems integration, electronics technicians, and
IT economists for commercial applications to be developed have played honest
parts.

And if our efforts at resource creation on a national scale have to succeed,
it will need the same intensity of efforts in the eleventh five year plan to
encourage public-private partnerships that will build resources for the IT and
BPO sectors, as well as the other services professions in the country. The
moribund state of the ITIs which are only now being focused on by worthy
associations like the CII should not be the fate of services education. This
will need Nasscom and the state governments to develop processes and programs,
and private sectors to work in concert to address the enormous challenge. Maybe
then we will witness consistent success in the economy like the consistent
German football team and not just streaks of individual brilliance that
continues to characterise Indian cricket even today!