E to E, TMI style
A backward integration approach by an NSDC partner ensures job without fail. Meha Mathur reports how

For Muralidharan T, Chairman, TMI Group, perhaps the biggest problem facing the country is educated unemployment. He narrates an experience to substantiate this. During a study in Rajasthan, he was discussing with a village sarpanch, as to why are young people in his village not getting adequately educated. In response, the sarpanch called two youngsters, one with a BA in political history (Hindi Medium) and the other, with an MA in the same subject. Both the youngsters were unemployed. On being asked why hadn’t they take up subjects which would improve their employability, they responded that the only bus from their village to Jaipur reached the destination at 3.00 pm, and in afternoon hours that was the only subject that was on offer. Thus in case of two people, bus timing had sealed the fate. And since they were graduates, working on farms was rendered below dignity.

Each year, India sees two million youth graduating, of whom only 20-25 per cent are employable. The rest end up in frustration. It is to address the paradox of this segment of youth that TMI Group, a leading HR Services provider of India, has started the TMI e2E Academy. ‘e2E’ stands for ‘Education to Employment’. And the basic idea behind this initiative is that a candidate, when he passes out of a course, should have a job in hand. Says Muralidharan, “Everyone is devising programmes for uneducated, or non-graduates, in which employers are not involved. The approach is, that the society should train a person, while the employer reaps the benefit. We have devised a new private sector model, in which the employer owns up.”

JOJOE
The new model is called Jointly Owned Job Oriented Education (JOJOE), wherein students are preassessed for jobs in sales, insurance, telecom, banking, customer service, back office etc, based on curriculum specified by employers. Students get pre-enrolment offers from prospective employers, and are employed the day they finish their training satisfactorily. This is a post-offer model with customised training. The cost of training is shared by the employer and the student, because the employer gets the right candidate as per their specification, and student gets guaranteed employment.

The courses will be offered in semi-urban and rural settings. Rather than physical infrastructure, the focus will be on content, as physical infrastructure can be taken care of by hiring existing school/college buildings. The training will be of 180 hours. To understand job requirement as precursor to training, TMI Academy teams spend time with the employer, and do job analysis of each role to the extent of breaking up the responsibility into smallest tasks. The team studies the behaviour of best performers in the company to understand how they perform various tasks. This is the starting point for creation of course content. Interestingly, while communication skills are built into the course, English language competency is not imperative, as the prospective workers would be working in rural/semi-urban setting. The training will be of three months.

The trainers would be people with domain knowledge, sourced locally but trained and certified by TMI in Hyderabad. Muralidharan says that the content is prepared in such a way that the trainer becomes just the deliverer of the model. The certification at the end of the course is done by TMI and the employer.

The fact that this self-sustaining model is effective can be borne by the fact that NSDC has made TMI Academy a partner to train about five lakh persons in 10 years, covering 31 States and Union Territories. NSDC’s loan component is `24.1 crore. TMI will be offering 44 courses, from 915 campuses.

TMI is in a position to offer the courses on a pan-India level, to the satisfaction of employers, thanks to its existing operations. It has recruited over 50,000 executives for the corporate sector in India, the US and the Middle East. It thus understands the market requirement, and how to bridge the gap between industry expectations and job seekers, by providing right training. It has a pan-India network, and is in a position to rope in corporate sector for assured placements.

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