Reading the article entitled “South Korea tested by rise in over-educated workers,” in the Financial Times on October 10, 2013, I started wondering about the broader question of the skills we need in India and the education system that we have. Clearly, we have some huge misalignments, as I have come to realize from recently building a home in India.

Living outside India for the past 30 years I had gotten used to dealing with tradespeople who were skilled at what they did. Tradespeople who are professionals. The plumbers and electricians I had gotten used to dealing with are trained and certified and are skillful at the jobs they do. Indeed, in most of the places I have lived, you need a certified tradesperson to do these things if you want your insurance company to payout in case of damage due to hazards stemming from your plumbing, electrical circuits, and the like.

My experience in India made me realize how lacking in professionalism the tradespeople are in the construction business. None of the electricians and plumbers who worked on our house had any kind of certification. They had simply learned on the job and had a very rudimentary understanding of what they were doing. In fact, on occasion, I had to intervene to help them figure out how to get stuff done, and I am the first person to admit that I know very little about any of these things.

Talking to friends in India, it is clear, that my problem was far from unique. All of them have problems finding good plumbers, electricians, and more generally any tradespeople when they need help. At the same time, you find graduates with university degrees undertaking relatively unskilled jobs like driving taxis or as bus conductors and the like. This mismatch has significant economic consequences that we don’t ever look at, discuss, or debate. It is clearly time we did this.

Clearly, as a first step we need training institutions, we need certification programs, and we need to require that professionals with certificates undertake various building tasks so that they are done properly. This however will only be the tip of the iceberg. In a culture that looks down upon physical work, it will be important to change the mindset of parents and their children on the one hand and consumers on the other. Parents and children need to see value in acquiring skills that can be parlayed in to a successful and secure economic future. They need to take pride in their trade skills and earning a living through them. As customers of this new breed of tradespeople, we who will use their services also need to change our mindsets. We need to treat tradespeople as professionals, treat them with the dignity and respect they deserve. Not with the contempt and disdain that we see all too often today, as tradespeople are seen as inferior as they are doing something menial! They are not. They are professionals providing an important and vital service to make the rest of our lives run smoothly and uneventfully. We should treat them with the respect they deserve.