Nurturing Leaders for Tomorrow - With Life Skills Education

Abstract

The fierce competition in global scenario investigates youth to embark the challenges of life. Unfortunately shifting life styles, nuclear homes, materialistic desires and redundant pedagogy of education has paved way for an upsurge growth in stress, anxiety, suicidal tendencies among youth. They lack the desired leadership, creative, emotional intelligence skills, which sums up together as life skills, required for sustainability in personal and professional dimensions. The crux of the problem is that critical thinking, problem solving and application of concepts are in short supply among youth, as they never had exposure to it. In respect to India more than 700 million Indians are expected to be of working age group by 2022; although by FICCI skills report 2012 only 25% professionals are employable. The scenario is alarming, as by year 2030, half of India’s population will be younger than 28. The research paper tries to co-relate the lack of life skills education in youth’s formative years which leads to low conceptual, creative ability leading to dearth of leaders in pipeline through a pilot survey of MBA students regarding their life skills quotient. The paper proposes to nurture leadership skills by imparting life skills education in the foundation days itself.