Bala Shankar, Founder Director, NPS International School, Singapore; Author
- Published Author, Global Leader, and Account Director with experience in Strategy, Sales & Marketing across Asia. USA and Europe.
Podcast
Overview
Every child has the fundamental right to quality education – one that helps them acquire basic literacy and numeracy, enjoy learning without fear, and feel valued and included, irrespective of where they come from. Access to education of poor quality is tantamount to no education at all. There is little point in providing the opportunity for a child to enroll in school if the quality of the education is so poor that the child will not become literate or numerate, or will fail to acquire critical life skills.
00:41- About Bala Shankar
- Published Author, Global Leader, and Account Director with experience in Strategy, Sales & Marketing across Asia. USA and Europe.
- Outstanding results achieved in New Markets, Regional scale-up, Professional Team building, Mergers, and Private Equity environments.
- Managed accounts like Unilever, P&G, Henkel, and J & J regionally/globally.
- Established a large educational institution and actively pursuing compelling opportunities in the Education space.
03:12- What were some of your challenges and learnings as you built the school?
- Like most schools, our first challenge was identifying a good partner because my wife and I came from a corporate background.
- We needed a know-how partner and a brand partner who would bring all the complementary things to the school.
- Singapore was already a crowded Market. There are probably about 35 schools similar to ours and differentiating and attracting parents to a completely new entity was the second challenge.
- We built it around academic Excellence but at the same time holistic education and value-based education vary from the development of individual characters, so we had to come up with a package that was interesting.
11:40- How does culture impact education?
- We are now slowly seeing a situation where many schools are following the international curriculum.
- You might lose some single cultures, you might lose for instance language emphasis.
- We do offer some Indian languages, but we find that even native Hindi speakers for instance want to study French or Spanish.
- We do have some value in education. We celebrate every Festival in the world.
12:47- About the book ‘The Twelve Habits of Smart Skill-Building’
- Human improvements have always been the backbone of inventions that advanced mankind.
- These were based on both knowledge and skills that we gained from time to time.
- Never before in the past decades has the topic of skills received as widespread attention and debate as now, with the dominant opinion equating success with upskilling or re-skilling – and failure with stagnant skill sets.
- The concept of lifelong learning is challenging the old-school maxim of front-loading all education.
- It is therefore intriguing to understand how people can take their core skills to new areas of work. What is the morphing mantra?
- How do people reshape their skill sets even when they are out of school?
- As knowledge and skill become increasingly crucial in human versus machine competition, should we be analyzing how we use old skills to do new tasks?
- And develop new skills with old abilities? What habit patterns helped successful people embrace skill learning and build it as second nature?
RESOURCES:
You can connect with Bala Shankar | LinkedIn
Profile
- Published Author, Global Leader, and Account Director with experience in Strategy, Sales & Marketing across Asia. USA and Europe.
- Outstanding results achieved in New Markets, Regional scale-up, Professional Team building, Mergers, and Private Equity environments.
- Managed accounts like Unilever, P&G, Henkel, and J & J regionally/globally.
- Established a large educational institution and actively pursuing compelling opportunities in the Education space.
