Artificial intelligence is increasingly taking over tasks such as drafting, translating and processing information. This phenomenon makes the value of human communication skills more pronounced, says Arun Rajamani, Managing Director, South Asia, Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
A recent Cambridge survey of nearly 1,900 college students across India found that while almost all respondents consider English important for securing a good job, 30 per cent identify English skills and confidence as a barrier to employment, and 57 per cent do not feel fully prepared for placements — gaps that over 80 per cent of students say they're trying to close through technical certifications, internships and English-language certification.
A separate Cambridge–British Council study (MultiEd), conducted in government schools in Delhi and Assam, found that structured use of students' home and regional languages alongside English improved reading comprehension and classroom engagement, with no negative effect on English outcomes.
In an exclusive interview with EdexLive, Rajamani discusses why English education needs to move beyond grammar and rote learning, the importance of building communication and critical-thinking skills from an early age, and how schools can use AI as a learning aid without letting it replace learning itself.
Your survey found that nearly 100 per cent of respondents consider English important for employability, yet 30 per cent identify a lack of confidence in English skills as a barrier to employment, while 57 per cent don't feel fully prepared for placements. How much of this is a language problem, and how much reflects deeper issues in India's higher education system, such as limited industry exposure or placement training?
The way we look at it is to ask, are there genuine issues with mastery of skills as far as discipline is concerned for the industry to feel that they're getting the industry skills that are required out of higher education? The answer is, with an ever-changing skills requirement today, the skills are changing so quickly.
There's always going to be this gap between what the industry wants and what the academy is able to produce. It's not that academia is not doing things in the manner it should to create people with confidence and the capabilities to look at how they can fit into the industry. It is just that the skills are changing so fast that academia will never be able to stay at pace with what the industry wants today.
That's one component that we can't take away. What can academia do to ensure that they're creating students with the right skill sets, if not the discipline, the capabilities, the attitude and the core thinking skills that can allow the adaptability of these students into the workforce segment?
But the problem does remain very acute as far as the confidence levels are concerned to communicate what learners know today, what students know today at the workplace. That continues to remain a core barrier as far as employability is concerned today. That's where the confidence as well as the apprehension of students is coming from.
In an era where AI tools are becoming increasingly capable of writing, translating and even communicating on behalf of users, what does English proficiency actually mean today? Are employers looking for grammatical accuracy and fluency, or is the value increasingly placed on critical thinking, collaboration and effective communication?
It's the skill that matters, not the mastery of the subject itself. Traditionally, our education systems have always focused on mastery of a subject.
A lot of students of my generation and subsequent generations have gone through a model built around rote learning. In English, a student could be very good at reading, very good at writing, and score great grades in assessments because most of it was testing rote. But when they were asked to stand up and speak or listen to another point of view, that's where we fell short. That's where the confidence comes up.
The issue of confidence comes up exactly in that element: if they could present their thoughts in a very powerful way, in a complex human-to-human setting, where they have to negotiate, talk to others, convince others, make sense of a vast amount of information that today they will have at their disposal, and present those arguments in a logical way for them to get the work done. This is a place where the confidence starts to fall short.
AI will create a lot of assistance to a person in the workforce. They can draft their emails very well, they can make sure that they're checking their presentations, they can do their presentations fast, all that will happen.
But ultimately, someone has to speak to communicate. It's the effectiveness of the communication that matters, not necessarily grammar and syntax.
We focus more on the skill capability of English as a language, where all four skills — reading, writing, listening and speaking — are developed in equal measure for a person to not just feel confident about their capabilities, but also look at using their confidence for success at the workplace. These two are linked today. Getting a job is one part of it.
One of our earlier surveys that we had done a few years ago, even before the situation started to become more acute today in the world of AI, found that a learner who mastered proficiency in English, especially around communication, had twice the probability of getting a job. Not only was the probability of getting a job higher, it was also that the person could get a higher-paying job than another person who did not have the same level of proficiency in English, especially when English is considered to be the link language for business in the world.
Superior skills and communication could get the job, while continued proficiency in English and continued proficiency in communication skills in the workplace will also accelerate job and career success.
These are very linked today. That's the importance that we're trying to enforce through these conferences to our teachers and schools: how do you place emphasis on skill building within the classroom, not just completion of a syllabus and not just making sure that students are able to acquire knowledge in English?
Across India, schools and higher education institutions have to balance the importance of English proficiency with the country's multilingual reality and the emphasis on local and mother-tongue languages. How can institutions balance these priorities, and what would an effective multilingual model look like?
I would like to preface this answer by saying that I'm a proud Tamilian myself, and I'm a product of the education system in Tamil Nadu.
I proudly claim to know at least four languages that I either speak or speak, read and write. From a government perspective, language has been a very big focus of education in Tamil Nadu, especially Tamil, which we all pride ourselves on as the oldest language in the world. The need for learning additional languages is actually dictated by an individual's career aspirations and by a need.
I learned Hindi because my job required me to travel to multiple places. I did half my higher education outside of Tamil Nadu, so there was a necessity which prompted me to learn.
I lived in Bangalore for many years, and therefore learned Kannada because it was required for me to thrive in the city. One picks up languages on the basis of necessity and need.
Very few people actually learn languages for the love of languages. Most people learn languages because there's a necessity. Tamil Nadu has always advocated the cause of English and Tamil very clearly, because these are the two languages that have helped propel the economy of the state.
We've been working very closely with the Tamil Nadu government on the Naan Mudhalvan project, which is one of the flagship projects under the previous government, which is now continuing with the new government with a different programme and with slight changes in the programme. It's all about how you equip equitable access to skills, whether it is in language, whether it is in the discipline or domain, whether it is in emerging skill areas, to ensure that students from less privileged backgrounds have the opportunity to learn new skills and make them more equitably employed in the workforce. That's the fundamental aspect.
We've trained over 8 lakh students. We've tested and trained over 8 lakh students in Tamil Nadu over the years on English language proficiency. By far, one of the largest projects that we've done on English language education in Tamil Nadu.
The government realises the need for English and that's what has been the focus of implementation. To make that real within the classroom, traditionally, our education systems are focused on bringing subjects, English as a subject or language as a subject.
It might be Tamil, it might be English, it might be any other language that we might think about in other states. The moment you're able to change that approach, you continue to teach the concepts of the subject, which are critical for acquiring the skills, and then you add activities and task-based approaches that enable students to learn the skills across the four skill areas — listening, speaking, reading, and writing — then the development and proficiency improvement is more holistic.
If the teacher in the classroom is able to encourage every student to debate and discuss topics, and in the world of AI, that's even more important because what you get as information from AI tools is not democratised. You can't just take the word for it that that's a version of truth. You've got to debate it. If you bring debates into the classroom, then people are encouraged to use more debating approaches to learn to speak well and speak with confidence.
Second, if there are activities like Toastmasters Club, debates and elocutions that the teachers can bring in in a non-threatening environment and encourage everyone to speak no matter what their levels of confidence are, over time, confidence starts to build up. If they're encouraged to do more listening activities across cultural boundaries and different accent models, then that enables students to comprehend what they are listening to and then start to use those capabilities that they learn in order to put that into practice. These are simple approaches that the Cambridge programme today advocates as to how teachers can make language learning through an activity-based model in a classroom.
Given that India is very large, multicultural and multilingual in nature, one of the research projects that a Cambridge University professor who leads our linguistics department in the University of Cambridge in the UK has been doing is to look at what are the effective frameworks for bilingual education that can help understand English learning better. We always think in our mother tongue before we can actually start speaking in a foreign language. If there are effective frameworks that allow us to think in our mother tongue, start to then use the thinking process to debate in a foreign language, then that language understanding becomes much easier.
There's a research paper that's published recently that talks about the effectiveness of these multilingual or bilingual frameworks. This is what we are trying to bring into our teacher training models as well: can teachers then take this to students who come from a deeply rooted mother tongue environment at home because parents might not have studied English at all? They may be first-time schoolgoers or first-time graduates in their families.
When they learn something in the classroom, how do they practise it at home? It's not going to be very easy for them to do that other than using digital tools. But if those frameworks enable them to have the thinking mindset in the mother tongue, but then start to use the foreign language, in this case English, then that can become an effective way for the teacher to infuse that process in the classroom.
Your survey also found that 23 per cent of students identify gaps in technical skills and 22 per cent cite a lack of internships and real-world experience as barriers to employment. What is the ideal balance between technical competence, communication skills and practical experience? Are colleges emphasising one at the expense of the others?
So I think the way I would like to respond to that question is to say that what are higher education institutions doing today in the world of a rapid changing skill set approach? Because they can't, as I said before, continue to keep pace all the time or be at the leading edge of how they're trying to create skill sets from higher education for what the industry needs. The best thing that higher education institutions can do for their students is to prepare them for a very uncertain world.
If there is a change that happens three years hence, after they join the workforce, how does the student have the skill sets required to cope with that change, the adaptability requirements, the ability for them to have the critical thinking aspects, the constant curiosity for lifelong learning, the ability to do deep research, the ability to be connected in a global world to understand trends, the ability to use tools like AI that can help fast-track some of the skill acquisition processes, while keeping the human and the complex engagements, or the interpersonal and communication skills, in perspective. These are the things that higher education institutions can do well in order for the learners to be equipped for life.
A small child that comes into our pre-primary or Montessori or early years programme today, which is three years of age or three and a half years of age, is likely to retire in the year 2080. Do we even comprehend what skill sets are required by 2080? We can't.
Our education systems in the past were training students on job skills. But that's fast changing. We've seen that with AI where repetitive, process-based jobs have gone.
If the institutions and the education systems are training people for a job, and the job is no longer available, then what does the student do? All we can do right now is ensure that they get the life skills required for them to constantly adapt to change and learn new skills. That's where I think the focus of institutions is going to be.
This balance between job readiness, domain skills versus life skills, in my opinion, needs to have a higher component of life skills that students would learn, which would better prepare them for an uncertain world. The discipline is where, through these aspects of internships and government-led programmes that give them opportunities to learn new skills which are not in the curriculum, students are going to acquire the first level of job readiness requirement.
What are the biggest changes that schools, higher education institutions and policymakers should prioritise over the next five years to prepare students for a workforce that expects them to work with AI?
I'll keep my response centred around language and communication skills because there's a lot of work that's going on on the discipline and the domain skills, which I think, you know, there are more competent authorities to talk about that. So, insofar as, you know, the requirement for policymakers, institutional leaders, as well as school leaders think about providing the opportunity and equitable access to students to learn and master communication skills and the language is concerned, we have to first keep in perspective that today we are looking at two streams of students who come into the higher education systems getting ready to go into the workforce. There's one that comes from an English medium of instruction background, may not be the most ideal, but at least they have an English medium experience before they come into a higher education institution that also teaches an English medium. There's another stream of students who are perhaps coming in from vernacular, mother tongue, you know, led education models, and who have to immediately adapt to an English medium of instructions while they are in HE.
So, there are two streams. And for those two streams, policymakers need to think about two different approaches here. For one, which is coming in from an English medium of instruction model, what is really critical is to ensure that language skills, communication skills, and the practical aspects are infused right from primary curriculum onwards, where English as a skill is being taught.
Because the first eight years of formative education is when most amount of skill sets get picked up in the right way. So, how does both the private sector as well as the public institutions that offer or institutions that are affiliated to, you know, matriculation and state boards or partly funded, you know, schools that I would say, how do they have the opportunity to bring in skills based education right from primary going up to lower secondary? So, that's the first thing that institutional leaders need to be thinking about.
And making sure that it's blended with the curriculum, so that the syllabus and the skills do not go in two separate directions. They are both integrated and infused. And Cambridge does a lot of work in enabling, you know, teachers to be bringing skills and knowledge as integrated programmes within the classroom today.
As far as the higher education model is concerned, how do the higher education leaders today, HE leaders, think about bringing in more intensive programmes in the first two years of a student's life while in higher education, which is the most critical opportunity they have to learn a language skill and get ready for a placement, whether it's a three-year programme, four-year programme, or a five-year programme.
The first two years are very critical. So, they're thinking about bringing in credit-based models, where the student is now looking at learning language and acquiring a skill that also earns them credits, so that there's more seriousness to that study, becomes very important.
But then we need to think about highly personalised learning opportunities there, because you're looking at two streams, people who come with English-speaking backgrounds and people who do not come from English-speaking backgrounds.
If you try and use the same approach of a programme for both, it's not going to be helpful. One might find it very easy, the other might find it too tough. So, how do you, therefore, personalise and have different cohorts and different programmes for people with these two backgrounds will become very important.
But the common element that will tie that together is to have that blended with the credit-based approach that you take. They need to also look at training their instructors. Their HE faculty also needs to be trained in order for them to bring skilling.
So, a combination of three things, bringing school education into the four, primary to lower secondary, and blending that with the syllabus, critical. In HE, making sure that they're able to think about the approach where they're able to have credit-based programmes with different cohorts, catering to both the vernacular background students as well as the English medium of instruction background students. And training faculty on both sides to make sure they're able to impart skills is going to be absolutely important.
The last part I would say you need to have a globally recognised framework for assessment and testing, where your benchmarking is going to be more global in nature. Because often what happens is, if we do not have an established global reference framework for assessment as well as for benchmarking, it is going to be the teacher's ability to interpret, which can be very different for different teachers. And the moment you bring variability into benchmarking, then your approach towards having a common standard for measurement goes away.
So, in addition to all the programmes, learning, teacher capability, using a common framework for benchmarking is also very critical.
