Institutionalizing Academia-Industry interface leveraging the Gig Economy

Introduction

There are 2 major challenges that students face in today’s world, as they are entering the workplace:

• Lack of employment opportunities, as a result of the impacts of Economic slowdown post Covid-19, and
• Lack of real-world experiences, which prevent Employers considering new graduates for their open positions.

Further: A key gap that exists today in the space of Academia-Industry interface is the lack of an effective mechanism to quantify & qualify the success of this interface. Merely qualifying the success of Academia-Industry interface via “number of employed students” is inadequate, as this number would also be influenced by the actual state of the economy & industry in each geographical location as well as the country and the world as a whole.

Lack of Employment opportunities

According to AISHE report from MHRD, around 3.66 crore students will be graduating this year. On the other hand, as per CMIE 2020-21 data, unemployment rate is currently at 6.90%, after shooting up to 23.5% in April 2020.

Naturally, students who are fresh to the workplace will find it difficult to land opportunities, as they will be in competition with their more experienced counterparts who may be willing to work for lesser remunerations, due to overall economic pressures in businesses.

Lack of Real-world experiences

The lack of “real-world experiences” in our students is a major deterrent for them to land Jobs that are suited to their education levels & aspirations.

Educational institutions are waking up to this fact and are trying to collaborate with industries in their respective areas, but a concerted effort is needed to qualitatively and quantitatively define Academia-Industry interfaces & the resulting experience delivery to students.

Further, the existing methods for interfacing academia & industry must be made deeper & customer goal-oriented, rather than having the objective as “establishing an interface”, so that Students can get a true experience of the Customer’s pain points & potential solutions.

Gig Economy and its relevance

As per Investopedia, “In a gig economy, temporary, flexible jobs are commonplace and companies tend to hire independent contractors and freelancers instead of full-time employees”.

Due to Covid-19 lockdowns, it has become more apparent to Businesses and to Employees that Remote work is a highly viable option for performing work effectively. Hence, the Covid pandemic has opened up doors widely for the adoption of Gig economy, where workers are temporary in nature, and work remotely to deliver the required services.

The nature of work is changing globally

The nature of work being freelanced or outsourced remotely, is changing. More complex  work activities are being performed by Freelancers and Contractors, even in areas never delivered in this manner previously. Studies by Accenture and McKinsey fully support these findings.

Gartner has recently published a research study, wherein they have predicted the popularization of Hybrid teams. What this means is: Teams shall be formed for fixed-term engagements, using a variety of sources including in-house Business staff and Freelancers/ Contractors.

Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite, recently published  his findings from a series of surveys conducted during the Covid-19 lockdown period, via LinkedIn Pulse.

What the above references demonstrate is: The nature of work is changing. Talent access is increasingly becoming on-demand, fixed-term, and the traditional long-term employment approach is losing steam. Remote work & the Gig Economy are becoming widely prevalent, and we must change our academics strategy to also align with this change.

How would this work ?

Students must be made aware of the vast opportunities available to them in the Gig economy. Many work domains have high penetration in freelancing: Information technology, Data science, Creative, Marketing & Branding, Sales, Administration, Engineering & Architecture design, Legal, Finance & taxes, Translations, Human resources, etc are some of these areas.

Moreover, opportunities are available at various skill levels and remuneration levels, so that Students can pick and choose opportunities that they are best fit for. They would also be able to scale to more complex assignments as they grow in skills & confidence, and become more effective in their career directions.

The Assignments & Electives that are a standard part of the curriculum may be replaced with assignments picked & chosen from Gig Economy platforms, thereby ensuring the currency & applicability of assignments for the career stream that the students are pursuing.

However, adequate preparation must go into making ourselves ready for this switch.

Students must be trained on best practices and etiquette of working effectively in the Gig economy, so that they can be consistently successful in their pursuits of learning & experience.

Educators assisting the students must also be made aware of the vast potential of the Gig economy. They must be able to guide their students towards success, and handhold them in this journey.

The above topics must be included as mandatory inclusions in the curriculums of various streams, and implementation methodologies must be carefully designed so that educators have clarity on how to guide their students, and so that students can achieve the best results out of this engagement; The  results being both “real-world experience” and remuneration that can help them become more independent.

Measures of success for the Academia-Industry interface

Leveraging the Gig economy to drive the Academia-Industry interface can immensely help the career-forming of all students in a well-aligned manner, and enable universities to qualify the outcome of such engagements as successful or unsuccessful, based on the volume of gig engagements & the remunerations generated.

Using data collected over a few years, the Central & State Governments and the UGC would be able to define better targets for Academia-Industry interfaces, and drive concrete actions to drive improvement for the entire ecosystem.

The crucial relevance of the Gig Economy and Remote Work for India

India is a very diverse country, with 72% of its population being in Rural areas. Tier-3 and lower towns and villages hence have a great part of the population, but with an unequal portion of ability to generate earnings. This is potentially driving migrations to urban areas, with all its resulting overcrowding and other implications.

If the Tier-3 and lower towns and villages were able to support their own income generation, then the need for additional income would no longer be a key driver in the need to migrate to Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities.

Widening the potential for Remote work, via spreading the awareness about the Gig economy, could be a critical step towards smoothening the economics across rural & urban areas, and overall improvement of the economies India-wide.

India has already invested significantly in its Internet availability in large parts of the country. This enabler can be leveraged to drive success of this initiative. The resulting improved utilization of the Telecom infrastructure would also then start to self-fund the improving of the infrastructure base.

Conclusion

Academic institutions, and India as a whole, must wake up to the criticality of Gig Economy and Remote work and its relevance to our economy. Our educational institutions and the Government at all levels must institute concrete & concerted steps to adopt and leverage the Gig Economy, as a mechanism to scale up the Academia-Industry interface, and to more effectively measure the success of engagement.

Note: 
This paper was the Third-place winner at PHDCCI’s Call for articles at the 8th National Summit on Institutionalizing Academia-Industry interface conducted on 13th March 2021.