n India, the speed and scale of the response has taken a very different form, spearheaded not by government, but by the private sector. Indian companies face a huge potential skill gap for, while the technical education in the Indian Institutes of Technology is of a high level, the general education standards across the country are poor. For Indian’s rapidly growing IT sector, represented by companies such as Wipro, Infosys and TCS, this could be a disaster. Yet instead of accepting this, these companies have reached out into communities across the continent to significantly impact the development millions of youngsters. Executives at Wipro, for example, work with tens of thousands of colleges across India to train teachers to develop IT skills, build state-of-the-art curricula, and encourage students to become what they term ‘work-ready’. With a recruitment target in 2011/12 of 60,000, the teams at TCS play a similar role in helping young people across India understand from an early age what the most valuable skills for the future are, and how best to acquire them. Like Infosys they also work closely with hundreds of thousands of teenagers to actively increase their skills.
Flexibility as a tool to create a workplace that makes people live
