Talent must focus on enterprise skills

The head of Best Buy India, Surendra Bashani, said one recurring mismatch he notices on returning to India after spending two decades abroad is that candidates here invest heavily in technical upskilling but underinvest in what he described as enterprise skills. “Indian engineers are great technologists, but one of the gaps I see here is a bit of a lack of soft skills,” he said during a panel discussion.

He said that this goes well beyond communication to include enterprise mindset, change management, coaching and mentoring, influencing, and the ability to work in a global, highly matrixed organisation. These skills, he argued, will be crucial for candidates looking to thrive in an AIdominated job market and should be prioritised alongside technical depth.

Rakesh Rajendran, founder and CEO of AI startup NudgeBee, echoed the shift away from traditional credentials, arguing that degrees and grades matter less today than evidence of independent thinking and realworld output. “Your grades and your curriculum do not matter because knowledge has been democratised significantly,” he said. What he looks for in potential hires, Rajendran added, is the ability to think from first principles and tangible proof that candidates have built or contributed to something outside their formal curriculum, such as opensource projects, research papers, or published work.

Kamal Stephen, APJC Talent Discovery Student Lead at SAP Labs India, who focuses on campus hiring, highlighted expectationsetting as another major gap. Students often want to work directly on AI from day one, he said, but many companies continue to operate on legacy technology stacks, with limited AI-led work in the near term. “Students come with an aspiration that they want to change the world, but it doesn’t happen immediately,” he said. Stephen urged early-career hires to focus instead on problem-solving, collaboration and critical thinking, rather than becoming overly fixated on a single technology or trend.

Bashani also argued that universities need to move beyond rote learning and invest in more worklike assessment models and deeper industry integration. He suggested experimenting with openbook, open-internet examinations where students are required to defend their solutions. He also recommended expanding co-operative programmes that place students in industry environments for meaningful periods, allowing them to work on real projects on the production floor. Without such exposure, he said, organisations often spend one to two years upskilling early-career hires before they can contribute meaningfully.

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