Global tech major IBM chief Ginni Rometty’s most-recent statement would certainly shock Indians to the core. She stressed on the fact that Indians lack the “required skillsets” to be employed in reputed companies. It is to be noted that the USD 180-billion domestic software industry recruits over 4 million employees globally.
Rometty, the chairman, president and chief executive of IBM, said this is an international problem which is just not limited to Indian shores. “In India, you have the same issues. Open jobs, (but) no matching skill sets,” she said while speaking at a company conference.
“You have got to believe in a few different things that I think you believed in the past. One is to believe that skills are perhaps more important than a degree,” Rometty said.
There have been numerous reports that nearly three-fourths of the millions of engineers are still hunting for jobs, just goes to show the quality of both the academics and the admission process in the country’s education systems.
Degrees don’t matter but the skill set matters a lot according to Rometty. “It can be that you can have folks with less than a university degree, but participate well in this industry,” Rometty said.
She also said that there are ample jobs and an equivalent number of people searching for them, but the fact is that skillsets are not matching.
She said, adding that businesses and governments have to work together in order to solve the problem, highlighting that people should have the know-how on how to work in the new technology-led era.
