Prof. (Dr.) D. Mukhopadhyay
The catastrophic devastation caused by Covid-19 Pandemic worldwide is a beggar’s description as this kind of socio-economic destruction can hardly be found to have been taken place during last one century. The world is certainly witness of the Spanish Flu that broke out during 1917-1918 which killed more people but thereafter, COVID-19 Pandemic has been the worst pandemic in last one hundred years. This Pandemic made us to see that the world economy shirked dramatically, as the national and international trade and industrial and commercial activities have been halted for an uncertain duration and consequently employment and job market became almost non-existent more particularly in manufacturing, fast moving consumable goods and service sector barring few.
The world economy was in her comfort zone as the corporate sector was experiencing and running the commercial operations with profit. But suddenly in one fine morning , the world came across that nothing but economic disaster made her at complete halt and undone by some unknown evil force which has taken the human civilization to the stagnant stage of socio-economic trauma and depression. In order to overcome and win the war against Covid-19 Pandemic, it is the high time and need of the hour for innovation, invention and discovery of new idea, new policy, methodology, new economic order and the accelerating strategies for starting almost everything from the scratch or even from the minus magnitude scale as the existing plans are non- applicable , technology and financial are of course non-responsive to the suddenly shocked economic environment. Besides, it may be treated to be an opportunity for getting the workforce equipped with new training, new skills , new methods and methodology for adapting new technology and its applications. For instance , ‘work from home’ is likely to give the cost and time leverage . However, the employees should practice little physical excise in order to keep themselves fit and healthy and agile as because daily commuting in hustling and bustling to reach the offices and workplaces was helpful in keeping someone more agile and alert. Moreover, adaptability to changed environment is likely to generate more confidence for sustainability under the socio-economic odds whether man-made or caused by nature. It is an interesting observation that remote -working magnitude in terms percentage was hardly 5 % in our country and the same has reached almost to 100%. Initially, it was seen to have been perceived that work from remote location not being under the conventional command and control and supervision shall generate negative results in terms of productivity, co-operative and collaborative impacts and learning and application adaptability. But in reality, working from remote places made it emerge a new generation tele-workforce coming into being and under the given circumstances, it is giving more productivity.
The firms having on rental or leases a whole multistoried building for housing its offices and staff in metropolitan cities where real estate is very expensive and the under the current situation , those firms are handing over the hired and or leased spaces keeping significantly a lesser quantum of office space. This may be pertinent to mention that rent and lease rents are part of the administration overhead and cut and reduced overhead is certainly to give a competitive edge in pricing and keeping the quality of the goods and services intact as per customer’s specifications at low cost is definitely to increase the volume of business in terms of sales hence earning a higher rate of return on investment is quite possible. In a nutshell, the new generation workforce shall be virtual used to enablers and it saves time and cost remarkably. The existing workforce has already got adapted with the new digital and technology driven work environment during last nine months . Moreover, it will also generate an advantage out of overall operating leverage. Moreover, another noticeable shifting in the concept of lifelong service in one firm is getting off and both the employer and employee are observed be preferring that the employees should move according to their suitability, desirability and earning ability and the employers are also preferring to have new strata of employees attributed with more technology savvy capability and habits. Moreover, an employee is to have a mindset to change its role from one kind of skill sets and expertise to another distinct and different ones. More particularly, it has to have multi-skill and expertise in different domains of knowledge as none is certain as to when the prevalent skill shall become redundant . This kind of paradigm shifting will be helping to develop and inculcate new skills, competencies and new experiences. It may be seen very soon that there shall emerge a new world order attributed with borderless and one geographical global village in true sense and work can be performed or done from anywhere in the world. For instance somebody’s reporting boss may be sitting in New York, collaborative counterpart is in Canada and the concerned employee is working from home in New Delhi or elsewhere in India in a project with the counterpart stationed in Australia. Under the given situation, it is the need of the hour to make ourselves multicultural adaptive, more travelling prone and enriching with the habit of acceptability of differences and very soon the location barriers are going to evaporate soon. Further , it is expected that there shall be wider reduction in head counts and campus placement in the educational Institutions shall be the challenging tasks of the placement officer and its team for procuring placement for the pass outs of the Institutions . The Sub-Prime Lending driven financial crises of 2008 seems to comparatively be much insignificant than the present economic crises on account Covid-19 Pandemic. According to certain research reports, , about 70% reduction in campus placement is forecasted in totality and tier I institutions can somehow have sustainable placement rate, Tier II are likely to face difficult situations and Tier III institutions and colleges are likely to face a severe drought with regard to placement and due to closure is not ruled out .
Moreover, retrenchment of employees shall become the order of the day and future with respect to career and opportunities shall become entirely the responsibility of the learners and only the performers trained with adaptability with new technological order shall be able to sustain in the employment market. Moreover, it may be an imperative for the students to opt for such a combination of skills and competencies which are in demand and complementary. The Engineering Courses in particular should have significant percentage of soft and management skills including data analytics coupled with continuous skills development, continuing education and renewals of certifications in order to get the favor of the employment market. The new ordered firms shall look for no introvert people but people with thought leadership qualities , inspirational leadership qualities , influencing with positive energies and the opinion leaders shall be preferred to others. The old maxim ” Boss is always right” is going to be redundant soon and people averse in opinion expressing shall be considered to be the burden of the firms of the kinds whether governmental or private sector because opining and critical thinking is going to be considered as the most essential ingredient of change management environment or managing the change. The situations in education sector are likely to become tenure based and substantial extent of the compensation shall have to be earned by teachers themselves and teachers of college and universities shall be redundant very fast unless they add new skills and knowledge in their profiles. Earning one Doctoral Degree may not be considered enough under multidisciplinary teaching-learning environment. Out of empirical observation, it may be mentioned that placement opportunities are likely to come from FMCG, IT, Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare Sectors, Telecommunication and certainly E-Commerce Domain of the economy and the conventional job providing enablers such as manufacturing, automotive, tour and travel, tourism and hospitality, banking and financial services and last but not the least real estate sector shall become very ineffective and are likely to make very insignificant contribution to employment generation. In brief, engineering domain such are machine learning, embedded engineering, cyber security , cloud architect, mobile application developers and quality assurance engineers will seem to top the list. Besides, commitment to lifelong learning, innovation and creativity, and critical thinkers are supposedly to top in other domains of learning.
Days of bureaucratized administration is to be put on ventilation and if not so, then the organization shall certainly be on ventilation! Resourcefulness coupled with problem solving capability shall become the very important variables in the profile of a professional and applied research is likely to get less prominence because of applied research’s inherent limitations and the same could be taken care of by basic research as ‘ inspire, innovate, invent, and infinity’ doctrine is likely to ensure long-term sustainability of an economy. The old-aged concept of pre-defined job description is going to be replaced by customization very soon and essentially, it is supposedly to dictate the contextually based customer value adding technology with which an employee needs to be well acquainted so that every individual customer gets tailor made services problem-solutions. A student in any campus if is devoid of or not exposed to the knowledge of intellectual, emotional, physical, social, artistic, creative, adaptability, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and spiritual domains, survival under post Covid-19 pandemic is quite uncertain. Therefore, new challenges, new opportunities and new order of society are outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic and sooner we learn how to accept new, quicker we become immune to un-sustainability for building economically sustainable order of the world.
(The author is Professor of Management, SMVD University, Jammu & Kashmir)
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