Newspaper editors will talk of the struggle of finding someone who writes a decent paragraph. TV editors will pull their hair out at the thought of dealing with dolts who can't spell - the bloomers on the tickers of most TV channels show that. Marketing heads will crib about how candidates lack numeric literacy or presence of mind.
What is the issue? Are the wrong kind of students taking up media as a profession? Are mass communication courses badly structured or have poor faculty? Or is it because media pays badly at starting levels.
Reasons behind the talent crunch in media
Image: Mudra Institute of Communication.Photographs: Courtesy, MICA website.
Those may be some of the reasons but they do not fully explain the lack of good people at starting levels in this business.
In 10 years of tracking this industry, I have taught at Mudra Institute of Communication (Ahmedabad) for three years, at Xavier Institute of Communications (Mumbai) for two and have interacted with hundreds of students for some reason or the other.
Sometimes I am pleasantly shocked at how good they are. My first two batches at MICA were outstanding. They asked tough questions, made me think about things and forced me to work harder for teaching them. Not surprisingly, almost all of them are doing very well within the M&E industry.
Reasons behind the talent crunch in media
Image: MICA.Funnily enough, the students doing their PhD in media-related areas in the same university were uniformly good.
That just tells you that it isn't just the basic quality of the students - that is a mixed bag, just like it would be in any other discipline.
Maybe one of the reasons - and all my friends in academia are going to hate me for saying this - is that there is too much leftist baggage in media education.
Reasons behind the talent crunch in media
Image: Media education.This breeds a judgmental, subjective approach to work, instead of an objective, enthusiastic one.
For instance, irrespective of where I have been to teach, most students have no idea about basic things such as, how big this industry is, what are the key components, which are the top companies.
Reasons behind the talent crunch in media
Image: Films.In many cases, these are opinions they hold after more than a year of media education. It is very difficult for them to grasp that media is a small, insignificant part of India's GDP.
Reasons behind the talent crunch in media
Image: Media, small business.As a result, at the end of two years of media education, all they have is a sneery attitude toward popular mass media and entertainment. Almost 70 per cent of the students will say they want to make documentaries or get into developmental media. However, this not-for-profit field cannot accommodate so many students.
Reasons behind the talent crunch in media
Image: Many ill-equipped for jobs.Many institutes, such as MICA, try to bring in more perspective by getting people from the industry. But because the industry itself is not evolved enough, the discipline too is not like, say, medicine or engineering. So the books, the pedagogy, almost everything is ad hoc and depends on whether you land a good professor or school.
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