Author: Anil Sachdeva
Employability opens the first door. A sense of responsibility shapes what a graduate does once inside. Higher education that prepares students for the first without the second is only half-finished
Early in a corporate career, an HR head faced a decision that stayed with him for decades. A batch of 21 new hires, recruited from some of India’s best schools, had falsified their travel expense reports after a group trip. Everyone was highly employable. Everyone had failed a test that no entrance exam or placement drill measures. The entire batch was let go.
That gap between skill and judgement now shows up in hiring data. India’s overall employability has risen to 56.35 per cent, yet employers want more than job readiness. In the 2023 QS Global Employer Survey, Indian companies reported skills gaps in ethics, social responsibility and a sustainability mindset that were bigger than in other parts of the world. Technical skill can be tested with some confidence. Trust is harder to assess, and it often decides who is handed decisions that matter.
This changes what higher education owes its students. A degree that gets someone hired is necessary, but no longer enough. Graduates now step into roles where a single decision can affect customers, communities or personal data at scale, often with AI tools that move faster than reflection. An ethics module helps. Responsibility, however, is learned the way most professional habits are: through practice, friction and exposure to people unlike oneself.
That conviction shaped the founding of SOIL Institute of Management in 2008. It was not designed in isolation. A consortium of 32 leading companies co-created it, so industry’s expectations were part of the curriculum from the start. Alongside it, the Social Innovation Programme has student teams work with NGOs one day a week on problems ranging from literacy to health. The assumption is simple: students who have sat with a community’s real constraints make different decisions when they later sit in boardrooms.
The value of this exposure lies in what case studies struggle to teach. NGOs work with limited resources, balance many stakeholders, build trust slowly and deliver results under uncertainty. That is also a fair description of most leadership roles. Empathy is a quality growing in value in an AI-driven world, and it is hard to build from a textbook. A fair question for the sector is what would change if social impact projects carried the same academic weight as corporate internships.
The wider sector can act on this without copying any single model. Responsibility has to be built into assessment, internships and faculty-industry exchange, not parked in an elective. Institutions can give real credit for community projects, bring in practitioners who have faced genuine ethical trade-offs, and follow alumni conduct as closely as placement packages.
For students and young professionals, the test is practical when choosing a programme or a first employer. Does social engagement carry real weight? Who from industry shapes what is taught? How does the institution develop judgement, not just skill?
Employability opens the first door. A sense of responsibility shapes what a graduate does once inside. Higher education that prepares students for the first without the second is only half-finished.
The writer is Founder of SOIL Institute of Management; Views presented are personal.