Creating Future Adaptive Workforces

Much of India's workforce is behind the times. Current re-skilling processes focus on training the workforce for today's needs but do not prepare the workforce for the emerging technology and market disruption keeping the workforce constantly behind the need curve.

Our approach is to train the future workforce, currently in schools and universities, in fundamental competencies, like self-learning, creativity, entrepreneurial attitudes, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving to build the 21st-century workforce capable of adapting to any market or technology changes. 

The Zero2Entrepreneur approach is an alternative experiential program in product design, coding, fabrication, Design-Thinking, and entrepreneurship with specially curated maker kits and mentoring methods backed by research. Experiments on youth showed these individuals shared acquired knowledge and skills through mentoring, drawing new candidates into the framework, to build and scale sustainable grassroots ecosystems in their community. 

The future of work in India and Indonesia, having young populations with a median age of 28 years, lies in the future workforce.

Much of this population is stuck in a stagnant cycle of generational poverty and un/under-employment while corporations are seeking a skilled workforce for survival and growth. 

While the creative potential of individuals across the world is the same, a lack of training in fundamental competencies creates this stagnancy. The Education Times reported that only 7% of 6 million graduates from 4000 non-primary Indian colleges are employable, making the skill gap a perennial concern. Primary causes are focus on rote learning, quality of teaching, digital literacy, and an industry-academic mismatch.

India’s New Education Policy has recognized that empowering youth in employability and entrepreneurial skills, including creativity and innovation, is the main goal and identified that technical education needs to be revamped and redesigned.

The lack of exposure to activities fostering an entrepreneurial mindset in schools and colleges limits the quality of the emerging workforce in a community. 

Our problem definition is: How might we build a future workforce, with core competencies to adapt to disruptive technology and market changes, from underserved communities.

The raw potential of all individuals is essentially the same irrespective of their background or upbringing, but experience and exposure can create significant differences in realized potential. In our focus to create the future adaptive workforce, we engage with students from rural schools and colleges with poor education and employment opportunities. Our study has shown that with project-based programs to design simple products, we enable individuals to cross their competency boundaries and build self-efficacy to learn and tackle any challenges, making them more effective in the workforce. These students, in turn, become mentors and role models to create ecosystems that enhance their communities. The ecosystem is the cradle of creating the future adaptive workforce. 

These students are not expected to have any prerequisite skills to join the program. The program imparts fundamental competencies which children and youth more readily absorb than adults. In our experiments, school and college students from farming villages impacted their communities by solving several existing problems using the skills they learned in our program. Some even became entrepreneurs and role models, raising skill levels to create a more significant impact in the community. 

Past talks on this topic:

TEDX UTP, MALAYSIA 2017: CREATING PRE-ENTREPRENEURS

TEDX BEACON STREET 2014: STARTING UP ENTREPRENEURS

MIT- SDM: CONFERENCE ON SYSTEMS THINKING FOR CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES

UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY: YOUTH AND TECHNOLOGY (SEPT 2018)

Training the labor force to learn and adapt to any change is more important than preparing them for the current skill gap demanded by today's technological wave.

Previously mentioned fundamental competencies are needed in today's workforce to adapt to the technology changes in the industry. Interestingly these are the same qualities that make innovators and entrepreneurs. 

Our focus is primarily on creating the next generation of the workforce with the necessary adaptive skills. 

Our Zero2Entrepreneur program was designed and tested in underserved rural communities with inadequate access to resources and technologies. We empower the youth to be changemakers and help scale the program's reach independently through a ripple effect with less external intervention, which is advantageous in hard-to-reach communities.

Rajesh Nair, Founder, CEO.

According to the WEF Future of Jobs Report, approximately 60% of future jobs have not been developed yet, and 40% of today's kindergarteners will need to be self-employed as adults to have an income. We need to prepare young minds for jobs that have not been created yet and build innovation and entrepreneurship skills to make them highly employable. 

We designed the Zero2Entrepreneur program with this goal in mind as the skills required to be an entrepreneur are similar to ones needed for an effective workforce. 

Most workforce skilling programs focus on building current competencies to meet today's needs. Our approach is to nurture tomorrow's adaptive workforce with fundamental skills, such as self-learning, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and entrepreneurship attitude that enables them to reskill themselves.

Our research shows that nurturing the uninitiated population- individuals who have not recognized their potential- through Zero2Entrepreneur framework can develop their self-efficacy to pursue new careers independently. Recent intervention in India with 52 students from a college resulted in more than 20 startups in advanced fields such as AI.

We are unique in our focus on enabling individuals to hone the skillset and mindset required to be innovators, entrepreneurs, and highly skilled employees.

Our approach is also an innovative blend of hands-on exercises and conceptual learning skills. We have already applied this cost-effective approach in 21 poor and rural communities in India, Malaysia, and East Timor.

The past nine years of research at MIT and Asia School of Business on the topic of catalyzing innovators and entrepreneurs in underserved communities in several countries gave multiple opportunities for testing and reflecting on the impact of our program. Technology is not the primary factor in learning, but the process is a holistic experience in problem identification, solution ideation, physical design, system design, coding, fabrication, and presentation. Each workshop engages students and encourages them to step outside their competence space to fail, analyze, reflect, and learn. Some of the tools we use are:

1. Arduino as a platform for learning electronic product design and coding
2. Computer literacy
3. Software and mobile applications
4. Audio-visual media
5. CAD to design physical parts
6. Fabrication using 3D printers, laser cutter, and hand tools
7. Microcontroller circuit design
8. Hardware and software testing and debugging
9. Design Thinking/ Future Thinking 
10. Movie making
11. Online collaboration tools for ideation
12. LMS for class management
13. Online community & social media for sharing designs and co-creation
14. Robotics

So what is the methodology used in this program? It is a combination of designing, applying, learning, and enhancing our teaching intervention to build confidence and creativity in youth irrespective of their current competency levels.

The development of the citizenry and economy are the primary focus of governments, and billions of dollars have been spent to bring up the productivity of its citizens to improve the latter. Though there have been top-level changes in nations, the bottom strata have not changed much in decades. Unless the nation's largest asset, its citizens, is skilled, the top-level performance will stay suboptimal. Current skilling programs happen later in the individual's life when most of their future is decided by the past, and he is in haste to reach financial stability. This cycle fails to capture the full potential of the individual or the citizenry.

The fundamental skills to become an effective worker are self-learning, creativity, digital literacy, critical thinking, problem-solving, and entrepreneurship. This builds a workforce culture that naturally supports adaptive skills to withstand disruptive market and technology changes.

Our theory of change is based on the belief that everyone can learn the fundamental skills if they are introduced early in their life with enough time to master and build self-confidence. The catalysts for change are the culture and mentors in their community. Our experiments have shown that these two factors can be built with the proper intervention through doing, failing, learning, and launching cycles. A failure is seen as a point for learning and builds confidence and resilience.

The Zero2Entrepreneur program is designed with several designed-in failure points to facilitate learning to lose the fear of failure.

Talk at UN General Assembly on youth and technology

Year 1: We plan to work with three communities/colleges in India where 30 youth are trained in the Zero2Entrepreneur program and mentored to become mentors in 3 months. These mentors, in turn, work with ten schools in the region to establish an innovation lab and train 100 students. The strength of students will reach 500 over the year through the ripple-effect. These school students and youth mentors will engage with more students over the next few years to reach several thousand exposed to these fundamental skills.

In Year 1, we will launch the online ecosystem platform to connect students from anywhere globally and offer mentorship and access to other participants. They cooperate, co-create, and cofound solutions to challenges in their communities and become a highly desired set of college admits and workforce with design, problem-solving, digital literacy, and entrepreneurship skills.

Year 5: We will reach 5 to 50 other communities/colleges to build ecosystems that scale and train 10,000 school students and 1,500 mentors in 100 communities every year. By this year, several of the students from the first year would be mentors themselves.

I have conducted some 70 Zero2Maker and Zero2Entrepreneur workshops as part of research and outreach and reached more than 3000 students in the last nine years. We are confident that a formalized and funded program can achieve this modest 5-year goal and beyond.

The measurements made during my research were on four factors using surveys and interviews:

1. Learning Agility: The ability to Self-learn, Curiosity, Research abilities, Digital fluency, Application of theory, and interest in STEM
2. Social Engagement: Factors such as Collaboration, Communication, and Leadership abilities, including Empathy, Mentoring, Effective listening, and Story-telling skills
3. Innovation Skills: Primarily Critical Thinking, Creative confidence, Problem-solving skills with abilities in Physical and Digital Design, Fabrication, Prototyping, and Validation
4. Entrepreneurial Attitudes: Self-Efficacy, Resilience, and Opportunity Sensing mindset with Value realization, System thinking, Adaptability, and Decision making.

These are the qualitative parameters we were measuring. In addition, we will measure Academic performance, Innovation activities such as designs and competitions, and Entrepreneurial activities such as startups.

Our approach takes a long-term view of skill development, primarily focusing on tomorrow’s workforce. Our experiments have shown that it is easier to introduce skills such as digital literacy, coding, mechanical and electrical design, fabrication, and presentation to children who are more fearless in their learning than adults. These children have years ahead of them to hone these skills and be multi-disciplinary contributors. However, there is more focus on skilling today’s workers in most programs, including MIT-SOLVE. Today, it is critical to establish the need for training the school and college students beyond what they learn at school to prepare them for 21st-century skills. This creates a workforce culture that naturally supports enhancement of skill levels.

Our projects are supported by corporate CSR or foundations that are not the direct beneficiaries of the program. External factors such as the pandemic and market instability caused challenges in funding, and we see this challenge continuing for the near future.

The first barrier of establishing the advantages of long-term skilling of future workforce vs training current ones needs to be addressed through evangelism. Stakeholders such as corporations, academic institutes, and government agencies expect a shorter period for demonstrating results due to external factors such as the election cycle.

The funding challenge is addressed through demonstrating evidence-based outcomes in local engagements through publishing results. Success begets success.

Currently, we have two full-time, two part-time, and several past students who work on projects as mentors.

Rajesh Nair has been working in nurturing young innovators in India through TechTop national innovation challenge that he founded in 2006. He has conducted over 100 workshops in seven countries in making, innovation, ideation, and entrepreneurship. He has also conducted corporate training programs in innovation for professionals AirAsia, TCS, UOB, and Axiata.

Encube Labs, LLC was incorporated by Rajesh Nair to fulfill his dream of creating entrepreneurs from the bottom up through personal empowerment in communities. Coming from a small village in India, he has worked for eight years in diverse environments in Malaysia, Timor Leste, India, Korea, and more. 
The rest of the core team are united in their belief in his vision and passion for education. The team has grown organically over the last few months and is totally aligned to the norms of diversity and inclusivity. 
The EnCube Labs team will keep this focus as we expand to take on new challenges. 

EnCube Labs has partnered with Schneider Electric (L&T) India to deliver the Zero2Maker program for students from 7 rural schools around Mysore. This project set up maker labs in these schools and reached some 2000 students in the region.
We have also worked with MOC Fitchburg, MA, to implement the Zero2Maker program in the community and the school system.
As part of the past workshops, Rajesh Nair worked with Asian Development Bank, UNDP, and MaGIC-Malaysia.

We target multiple stakeholders—the youth, colleges, schools, and industry. The value we offer the students consists of recognizing their abilities in learning and creating solutions, employability with multi-disciplinary skills, and entrepreneurship. Academic institutions see students becoming highly employable and creating jobs through their startups as essential assets to attract industry.

Our operational model connects these primary stakeholders to create value for each using the online networking platform that attracts students and colleges, enables mentorship, co-creation, and co-founding, and showcases their skills to industry and funds to facilitate placement and startups.

India and Indonesia have a young population that could be a demographic advantage if utilized well. Else it could lead to unemployment, poverty, and social unrest. The raw human potential is not currently developed well, leading to a poor workforce that affects the nation's GDP. The core of the problem is in skilling the youth while they are still in school and college such that they emerge as the new multi-disciplinary, productive workforce and job creators.

This critical intervention point of reaching the students in their college and school has been the field of research of the founder for the past nine years and work of EnCube Labs.

We believe that MIT-SOLVE can help spread this work that has shown successful results so far to stakeholders in these nations to consider igniting the rural population to build the country's human capital from the bottom up.

Partnering with Caterpillar Foundation that has done wonderful work in education with similar approach as us would give us a synergistic opportunity. 

Zero2Maker program in Kedah, Malaysia

EnCube Labs is a young company with a research background in nurturing innovators and entrepreneurs from underserved communities and experience running these programs in seven countries. The need of the day in these countries is to develop the workforce to create a productive industry. Our expertise can contribute significantly to this need by developing the next generation workforce with 21st-century skills.

Partners in the MIT-SOLVE program have what we do not; the reach into decision-makers in these nations, access to funding sources and support service providers, and academic links to help us further research into this field.