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Relevant skill

The one skill that will probably never go out of fashion is the skill
to be able to acquire new skills

BY VARALOTTI RENGASAMY

"Ma, why do we have such long legs?" a baby camel once asked his mother.
"So that we can keep our legs firmly in the desert sand and walk with
ease," the mother replied.

"And why the big hump at the back?"
"We walk in deserts and may go days on end without water. We store our
water there in that hump, dear."

"And what are these thick, long eye-lashes for?"
"To prevent the desert sand from hurting our eyes especially when
there are sand storms."

Another dozen questions in the same vein were rationally answered by
the mother camel. And then came the unanswerable last question:
"Then what the hell are we doing in the Mysore Zoo?"

Most of our students, especially those coming out of engineering
colleges, are like these camels — imprisoned in the wrong place with
irrelevant skill-sets. The million-dollar question now is: 'What is
the relevant skill?'

It is interesting to trace the history of 'relevant' skill sets. In
the fifties, handwriting was a prized skill. I remember my father
telling me about an interview he had once attended. The candidates
were given the day's newspaper and were asked to copy out a column
from that. Those with neat, legible handwriting were selected. Quite
understandable in the days where there were no typewriters let alone
computers. A good memory was for some time, a marketable skill. But
with the prices of memory chips going down by the hour, memory as a
human skill is losing its value. Likewise, the ability to manually add
up numbers lost its relevance with the advent of calculators and
computers.

But one skill is going to be relevant for today and for all tomorrows
to come. And that would be the skill to learn and acquire any new
skill at a short notice. Without this skill, you can be rendered
redundant any time. Take the case of those highly skilled artists who
would perch on perilous heights to paint on advertisement hoardings.
Nowadays, a combination of computers and high-profile printers
generate giant-sized posters, which are just pasted on the hoardings.

To develop the skill to acquire new skills — one has to have an open
mind, the ability not only to learn quickly but also to unlearn
equally fast, and the capacity to communicate and relate to others.

But that does not mean that we should not teach physics, chemistry,
literature, mathematics, accountancy, engineering, medicine and law.
But more importantly, all our schools and colleges should have
personality development courses that should aim at broadening the mind
and honing the skills to communicate with others and relate to people
in a better fashion.

Talking of skills, there is one skill that would always be at a
premium — the skill to use the skills of others. One of my friends is
a highly skilled computer programmer, silently making his millions in
the US. He and a hundred people like him are working for an NRI there.
And the surprising fact is that the boss who makes much more than all
these people put together does not know the ABC of computer
programming.

All his employees have skills. But he has the greater skill of using
those skills, to convert them into money. That kind of skill will
never go out of fashion

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Have a nice time....