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There is a joke that goes around in Europe that a typical game of football is one where twenty-two people kick the ball for around ninety minutes and at the end of the game Germany wins! For any soccer fan, the truth of this statement does not need to be reinforced with Germany pulling off narrow victories against much fancied opponents time and again with their particular brand of efficiency and precision in playing the game.

This is most apparent in the way the country has thought through its famous dual system of vocational education, a process that we have much to learn from, even as the Indian services industry faces the daunting prospect of preparing eight to ten million skilled services professionals every year, with at least a million of these in the IT and BPO sectors. Guided by the Vocational Training Act created in 1969 and updated in 2005, the responsibility for creating talent is shared by the firms, training schools, and young people, and administered by the eighty Chambers of Commerce and Industry that have ensured its implementation across all sectors of the German economy.

As in everything to do with Germany, the system permits adequate room for innovation within a prescribed framework that has seen a national decree established for every profession with over 350 training occupations recognised, of which 250 are in the field of industry, trade, and services. The contents of the educational curriculum, the apprenticeship in the industry, and the intermediate and final examinations for each profession, have been specified with more than 170,000 professionals working on an honorary basis in the examination boards. With an investment of over 27 bn on vocational training with an average cost per trainee of nearly 18,000 per year, the country can be justifiably proud of the results they have achieved. The training schools have been successful in building a high quality standard and are now aligning with the European Qualifications Framework to enable participants training in all parts of EU. Students see this stream as a high reward process that provides them monetary independence at an early age and the government itself is providing its full backing because of the inherent employment and social benefits that have already begun to show results for the German economy.

The IT training streams in vocational education have a lot in parallel to the formal system in India. And indeed the yeoman efforts undertaken by Aptech and NIIT in the early years of the private sector participation in IT training with basic IT operator courses having been enhanced to enable specialist professions like application development, systems integration, electronics technicians, and IT economists for commercial applications to be developed have played honest parts.

And if our efforts at resource creation on a national scale have to succeed, it will need the same intensity of efforts in the eleventh five year plan to encourage public-private partnerships that will build resources for the IT and BPO sectors, as well as the other services professions in the country. The moribund state of the ITIs which are only now being focused on by worthy associations like the CII should not be the fate of services education. This will need Nasscom and the state governments to develop processes and programs, and private sectors to work in concert to address the enormous challenge. Maybe then we will witness consistent success in the economy like the consistent German football team and not just streaks of individual brilliance that continues to characterise Indian cricket even today!

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