How You Can Escape The Indian Education Trap | Honest Roadmap For 17-24 Year Olds

June 4th. News channels around everywhere as the election results are out today as this national event takes the spotlight. Something weird is happening at the same time, something that's being overshadowed by the elections.

The NEET results are out. While this is routine for this time of the year, it’s something strange about this a tiny detail 67 students have scored 720 on 720 on the paper. Last year there were just two.

If you got a score of 687 in 2023, your rank would be 980. But this year a 687 would land you all the way over here. It doesn't end here.

14 days later, another exam was cancelled. And then one more. We have to travel so far and we are facing so much harassment.

It's like the education system is gamed against you. The students protest, the teachers protest. Big controversy, massive corruption, a giant web of lies.

But that's not what this video is about. Yep. While shooting the NEET video, I realized something I didn’t want to address Just the NEET issue I wanted to figure out- What can I do to help here?

I wanted to look at solutions and solutions, not for the government or policymakers because those are not in my control. Right. The solutions for you guys.

A plan for a lot of those folks who don't get into engineering colleges or medical colleges and get screwed over by this and still get screwed over by these exams. You know, I've been on the other side. I've been one of you have written all of these exams.

But now that I'm on the other side now that I run a company, I know how companies hire, what companies look for. I speak to founders execs every single day. So I ask myself, what if I used all the insights, all the experience that I have until now to solve a part of this problem?

Can I get 24 lakh NEET aspirants justice? I'm not sure, but let's do the math here, okay? We've got around 6.

5 lakh subscribers today. 45% of you are between the age of 18 to 24. So can I help 2.

6 lakh of you maybe land a job, not as a doctor, but something else? Can I help? The 2.

6 lakh of you get ready for the actual world where you can get hired and make some money? I think so I can at least try, right? So I charted out a plan, a blueprint which I'll be covering in this video.

Post we address the exam culture in India. You know, when I started researching on this video, I found that this is not the first time NTA has come under suspicion of exam scams. In fact, even last year the NTA led NEET exam had faulty OMR sheet issues.

Listen to this, back in 2021, the CBI busted a whole scam related to JEE Where a Russian called Mikhail Shargin was involved who was basically hacking into systems of examinations centers and helping 820 students cheat. In fact, if you look at the numbers from the last five years, there have been 41 instances of documented paper leaks in 15 states, which has affected around 1. 4 crore students.

That's an insane number. And by the way, these are just documented leaks. So the real number could be much, much worse.

If you look at the number of entrance exams, India has about 300 entrance exams and about 50 of those are conducted by government for jobs. So I was thinking, how do we solve this? Can we scrap these entrance exams altogether?

I don't think so, because given the size of a population, the need to have uniform entry criteria and get students to compete on a common starting point, we do need entrance exams. What they do is, they basically serve as an economical and objective bridge between colleges and universities to evaluate student merit. But the way they are conducted, the skills they are judging, those definitely need re-evaluation.

Now, this whole NEET issue also made me question that considering every year there are some or the other complaints that pop up, that OMRs are faulty sometimes questions have mistakes, sometimes marking patterns and ranks are inconsistent. Corruption is rampant. Why does the Indian student still keep taking these blows on the chin and keep fighting?

It got me thinking that what these exams essentially offer a student is some predictability. Predictability that once I crack this exam, I will get wealth or I will get status. Have you guys seen that Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

It’s basically a model for understanding the motivations for human behavior, which can include psychological needs like safety, love, belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization. So if you evaluate this Maslow's hierarchy for a nation, this is where we rank. If you look at a country, majority of India is still at the bottom of the pyramid, and we still need our basic safety needs to be fulfilled.

You see, the mass population of India is deprived of quality life. But you know what? This also got me thinking that if the way we perceive education and colleges are just a means towards social mobility, towards a better job, then why are parents, teachers, school, colleges blatantly ignoring the job market?

Right now, the conventional way to go about it is you go to school, write entrance exams, get into college, then try to get a job to make money. But what if flipped it around and started with the final outcome itself? That's the job.

That's what if you started questioning how do you land this job? How are you evaluated for this job? And how do you make yourself irreplaceable in a job?

And I tell you why I'm saying all this because recently I saw news TCS had released a statement saying that it has 80,000 job vacancies because the people they want to hire aren't skilled enough. So you see, on one side we complain about jobs and I also speak from my experience, right now. Right.

We have so many job vacancies right now, but we are struggling to find skilled talent. In fact, every founder I speak to complains that they have a hiring issue. Talent is not skilled enough.

Talent is not good enough. Is a phrase thrown around loosely. So the large problem is not really around jobs.

It's about matching your skill to the job. And that's why I created this blueprint, this top down approach. Now, is this plan useful for the 450 million labor force of India?

Maybe not. But I am here to help the subscribers we have. So is it valid for the total?

Some of you here watching this videos? Yes it is. Especially those of you who may not get into IITs, or colleges of your choice and feel like you’ve failed.

Let me tell you, you haven't. You've got your whole life ahead of you. You are literally just starting out.

Wait we've got some news. So we've launched a full scholarship for AevyTV viewers who are looking to pursue computer science, but want their aptitude to be judged in a more holistic way. Hear me out.

So if you look at exams like GMAT, it is used by management schools abroad to test candidates on language, math, logic skills, not just rote learning skills. So in India also, the NSET, the entrance exam, conducted by Scaler School of Technology for their Computer Science undergraduate course follows a similar pattern as GMAT. This test basically gauges your math, logical, and overall learning ability.

Basically, things that are relevant for CS, rather than subjects like chemistry. And instead of relying on just JEE marks to shortlist candidates, they look at a combination of profiles. Projects you've built, competitions you've taken part of, exam scores and also interviews that are conducted by industry professionals.

They run a 4 year undergraduate program in computer science in Bangalore. 100 plus tech leaders from Google, Microsoft and Amazon have united to establish this college, and they got notable figures like ex-Google India, M. D.

Rajan Anandan and Cred founder Kunal Shah. as supporters. The model of learning the latest tech skills by doing rather than memorizing is great because all industries today need more employees who are versed with skills in demand.

Watch this video till the end to know all the details of the scholarship by AevyTV. So what we're going to do is we start from the back, not from which college you want to go. What electives you want to choose, but from the job itself, from the very final outcome itself.

First, let's list out the competitive advantages you have right now. Do you have internet? If you're watching this, I'm sure you do.

Can you understand a little bit of English? If yes, then you're already far ahead. On top of this, if you also have a laptop or PC, you've literally got all the tools and means to make yourself valuable to an organization.

Now, why do I frame this sentence like this- “valuable to an organization”? You see, if you look at money. Money is earned in exchange for value you provide.

How do you provide this value to an organization? It’s going to be through your skills. So skills are the key term here.

Your skills are what will make you valuable to a company. And skills can now literally be learned anywhere. Till you have a good internet connection and a laptop.

Have you seen this Ikigai picture? So Ikigai basically represents the convergence of passion, mission, vocation and profession. A lot of people find it very profound.

But now that I’ve worked for so many years, what I've come to realize is that passion is a little bit overrated. It doesn't always direct you the right way. But if you can translate your passion into a skill that brings you an outcome that is not overrated.

That's when passion can turn into something useful. So maybe you identify as a creative person or you’re a problem solver, or you are the friend who always takes charge in a setting, or you're a good speaker. Whatever it is, I want you to identify what comes easy to you and find a skill that's tangential to it.

If you aren't passionate about anything, great because then you can jump to step two directly. I looked at all the jobs that we have recently been hiring for at AEOS to check how many vacancies are there for these jobs across India right now. I went on Naukri.

com, Indeed, LinkedIn. So let me show you some numbers on one of the platforms. Check this out.

I looked up graphic designer on Naukri. com, because we've been trying to hire a graphic designer for the longest time. Now to make this easier, because I'm making this video for folks who are just getting into colleges or right out of colleges.

Let's narrow the scope down further. Let's look at the jobs I posted in the last 30 days that require less than one year of experience. That literally just required the absolute basics.

3900 postings. I did this for every role we've been hiring for. Video editor, there are close to 14,971 jobs right now, and 3476 posted in the last one month, plus 500 recruiters that we also have.

So there are close to 4000 jobs again available for you to grab. Full Stack Developer jobs, 3840 jobs. Placement coordinator, who would have thought that there are so many people hiring placement coordinators, UI, UX designers, script writers, engineers, motion graphics.

All of these have more than 3000 job postings that were posted in the last 30 days, which require less than one year of experience. So for those of you who've been worried about jobs here, there are literally so many jobs for you to grab and I will tell you how to get them. Okay?

Again, in this video, I'm not telling you how to build a career, but I want to help you land your first job. And I'll also tell you why I'm so hellbent on the job and skill’s part, right after we go through all the six steps. Okay, now step three.

Let's say based on your interest, what you like, you have shortlisted 3 or 4 roles that you want to apply to in the next one year. What should we look at next? What we need to do now is we need to analyze the supply demand economics of each role.

That is, how many people do you think are applying for these jobs available? Now, this data is not available online anywhere. But I'll tell you why this is important.

Let's say you are applying for a role for which thousand other candidates are also applying. Obviously your chances are going to reduce, but if you're applying for a role where there are only like ten other people you're competing with, competition decreases and that's why you have high chances of grabbing that job. And one more thing this helps with is it makes you a more prized asset for the company, because they can't replace you easily.

There are not too many of you out there in the market. So you will become more useful. Your skills are more valuable, hence you need to analyze the supply demand for any role that you want to apply for.

Now let's look at the next step. Once you have narrowed down a job based on the supply demand economics and based on your interest, you need to analyze what are the skills required to land these jobs. You see, when most of these companies put out job postings, okay.

They’ll list down these plethora of skills that they want from a candidate. But when it comes to a fresher or somebody junior they want to hire. They literally only require 1 or 2 core skills from you that you will be doing repeatedly, every single day at the organization.

Now let's look at step five. Once you have narrowed down the role, the skills you need, you just need to plan out how do you acquire these skills? Can they be acquired in less than a few months?

Most of them, yes. Either from an upskilling course or from YouTube, or from your college itself. And you don't need to be the absolute best at this skill right now.

What you need to do is as soon as you pick up the skill, create a portfolio and some social media presence. This is your step six social media presence or putting your work in public increases your surface area of luck. That is, someone might stumble upon your project and want to hire you.

You know, a lot of the creative folks we hire are directly from Instagram and we stumble upon their work. Now I know getting your portfolio ready. Putting yourself out there.

This also requires a little bit of courage because as humans, we are all a little bit afraid of failure, right? And we get impostor syndrome thinking that what if I'm not good enough? What if my work is not good enough?

You need to get over it all you need to focus on is the final outcome that's getting that job. And all that requires is a portfolio and a skill that you need to have. If you want to see this job, create five reels on sales tactics that are helpful.

If you want a developer role, show something you've built. And these can all be personal projects. By the way, nobody is expecting you to have built insane stuff for your first few jobs.

Again, if you don't know how to create this portfolio, here are all the resources that you can check out on this Excel sheet again. You know, this is exactly how I landed my first gig as well. I learned a skill from YouTube that's graphic design.

I started posting actively on Instagram, and then I sent this cold DM to everybody on Twitter, Insta, email and landed my first job. It took me around four months to do it all. That's from learning to landing my first project.

And you know till date, if I see a portfolio, that looks good, I reply. Every single founder I know replies, a lot of organizations, by the way, do not even look at your colleges or degrees, so your proof of work is literally all that matters. And I'm not the only one saying this.

You can hear some of these founders yourself. There's no need even to have a college degree. I have not hired anybody ever looking at their degree.

I think explore what you want to do before committing is really like the key thing and keep yourself flexible. See, with the help of a degree you can get married, but you can’t get hired with a degree’s help. If I were hiring for marketing, if there was a kid who could take an Instagram page from 0 to 10,000.

Yeah That kid is killer. I want you folks to understand this is for people who have probably never done a job in their life, who don't know what it's like to work in an organization. You are the folks that I want to help out here.

So for those of you who are already working in different, different job or have 4 to 5 years of experience, I would really, really love it. If you can share your experience, how you landed your first job, what is it that helped you in the comments below? Because it can help somebody else out here and maybe help them land a job.

Now, I also want you all to understand that why I'm so hellbent on jobs and the skills bit. You know, it's because I realized that, once most of you enter the market, it gets a lot more easier because once you have a job, it'll bring you exposure. It'll bring you insights into how organizations work, how they hire, where the vacancies are.

And it also helps you build a network early on. It helps you build confidence, confidence which will help you take risks later in life. And I tell you one more thing, okay?

A lot of large companies, even startups in fact have an upskilling budget for their employees within companies. So if you are a good hire, that is you’re hard working and the company feels like you'll be able to pick up any skill along the way, they will pay you. They will upskill you just because you are very, very valuable to the company.

In fact, we have done this for a lot of people at AEOS as well. For example, I’ll tell you the story of Sagar, so he literally dropped out of college, joined us as a scriptwriter. Now, around one and a half years later, he's the main producer of Overpowered and Varun Mayya.

And not just him, we've got some people who joined us for the founder’s office role, and now they're literally managing over 20-25 people. So you can start somewhere else in an organization, but your role can literally evolve into something else altogether. If you are valuable to the company, all you need internet, laptop and your portfolio.

That's all. I spoke to a lot of students when I was shooting this video, and a lot of them came with this problem saying that, you know, I've spent 3 or 4 years in college studying X, so I have to go and pursue some job which is related to X and X only, even when there's no demand for that X skill, even when they don't even have the actual skills. I literally tell this to every single one of them that look at the supply demand of the jobs, look where the tailwinds are and don't fall prey to sunk cost fallacy.

Sunk cost fallacy is basically nothing but our tendency to follow through an idea that we’ve already invested time in. It's literally the worst trap, especially early on in your career. Don't be scared to experiment.

It's okay if you’ve spent four years maybe learning engineering or something else, but you want to shift your career. Go try it out. Get that portfolio ready.

It'll literally take you less than six months to land a new job. The second reason why I urge students to become skilled look for jobs is something called demographic dividend. If you don't know what that is, let me explain.

So demographic dividend basically refers to the economic growth potential that can result from a shift in country's age structure, primarily when the working age population that's between 15 to 64 years is larger than the non working age population that's younger than 15 years and older than 64 years. So what this does is this shift basically provides a boost to economic growth if the right social and economic policies are in place. You know, Japan was one of the first major economies to experience rapid growth because of changing population structure.

And this is where India is also at right now, more than 65% of India is under the age of 35. Now, the thing with this demographic dividend is that it's also cyclical. It's literally like Halley's Comet.

So it appears only once in a while and presents a rare opportunity for economic growth. So that's why this right now is a pivotal moment for India. And this demographic dividend, by the way, is conditioned on three factors.

First is the gender disparity in labor force participation. What that means is we need more women working and participating in the labor force. Second is the usefulness and skill of the labor force.

What that means is we need people to become skilled and have useful skills that can eventually get them jobs. Third is the rate at which jobs are created in different regions to accommodate the population growth in those regions. So we need to be creating more jobs where populations are higher.

And this is exactly why I'm so hellbent on jobs and skills. Now, I know this is a very optimistic ideal outcome I'm hoping for, but like I keep saying, we all need to try, we all need to do our parts. And this is also the reason why we do our video editing cohort and are so big on upskilling.

We want more people to get jobs and have a shot at social mobility. This is also why I support all the good education institutions which come up, which are trying to get students ready for the future, which is where I want to come back and talk about scaler school of technology and the full scholarship by Aevy. So the whole idea of scaler school of technology is to gain practical skills so that on day one you are ready to deliver as an engineer and, you know, as a part of the curriculum, they make students build more than 50 projects, which is pretty great.

And honestly, this is what engineering colleges need to be offering to get an engineer job ready as we mentioned, they have recently started a four year residential undergraduate program in Bangalore, and they are selecting a few talented students from across India for this. So to support these engineers, I have launched a scholarship to fund 100% of the tuition fee for one student who gets selected for the college. All you need to do is register for the entrance exam called Scaler National Scholarship and Entrance Test and use this code while registering.

There's also a video, by the way, on how to prepare for the test on their website. If you do well on the test and interview, you can get this scholarship, which Aevy will be personally funding. All the best and I hope you guys know something from the video today.

And for those of you who have already cracked your jobs, please do share your experiences and comment so we and others can learn from you. I'll see you in the next video. My name is, Achina Mayya signing off here.

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