Bisma had walked in armed with a glowing BA (English Honours) degree, fifty certificates, and ten medals.
The recruiter’s first question cut straight past all of it: “What can you do?”
Silence. Multiple rejections later, Bisma realised her résumé was heavy on proof of memory and light on evidence of skill.
“It felt like a blow. I’d always believed: marks set hai to life set hai. Then, in my very first interview, no one even looked at my percentage.”
When One Student Mirrors a National Pattern
The shock she felt isn’t anecdotal; it’s epidemiological.
- The India Skills Report 2024 shows fewer than half of new graduates are “employable”—employers cite missing practical abilities, not low marks.
- A Global Skills Gap Report 2020 found that 82% of Indian professionals feel college never equipped them with the skills they need at work, and 92% believe the country suffers an overall skills gap.
Behind every statistic is a Bisma, realising a mark-sheet can’t speak when it matters.
The gap looks like this:
Starting from Zero (Again)
Bisma did something toppers rarely practise: admitting she didn’t know. She chose one skill she could own—content strategy—and treated it like a new subject:
- Daily reps: one LinkedIn post, even if it earned only nine likes.
- After-hours homework: free courses, algorithm experiments, rewriting headlines.
- Mini projects: unpaid blog gigs just to gather evidence of work.
Three months later, those nine likes had become nine thousand; recruiters returned, drawn not by her mark-sheet but by the living portfolio she’d built in public.
“My trophies looked shiny on a shelf,” she says,
“but one solid project link opened more doors than all of them combined.”
Why Our Classrooms Still Miss the Lesson
Indian education mostly remains a marathon of memory. We test recall because it’s scalable; we celebrate toppers because it’s familiar. But in a job market shifting toward AI, design thinking, and soft-skill heavy roles, knowledge is only potential energy—it needs the kinetic push of practice.
Economists warn that India must create millions of skilled jobs every year to absorb new graduates. Yet youth unemployment hovers near 8%, with the educated faring worst.
Each mismatch fuels fresh pressure: more coaching, more cram courses, more belief that “maybe 99 % will be enough.”
What Bisma Wants to Tell Other Students
- Keep your books—but pick one skill. The one that truly makes you feel alive—and practise it until the proof is self-evident.
- Treat rejection as feedback, not a verdict.
- Marks open a door; skills keep it open.
She’d simply send them the LinkedIn post that broke her own bubble, because seeing a person admit the myth can be stronger than a thousand motivational quotes.
Disclaimer
I’m not an educationist, therapist, or academic expert.
I’m simply someone who’s been a student — and seen the silent pressures students carry.
I created Students of India not to preach solutions, but to ask better questions. To listen. To share stories. To create space for voices that are often ignored in conversations around education, success, and mental health.
If you're a student, teacher, parent, or just someone who remembers how heavy “expectation” can feel — this space is for you.
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