"It's Not the Effort. It's the Time." — The Dilemma of the Academic Calendar
I want to tell you about a sales call from a forgotten life.
I was selling a 48-hour human skills programme to a university on behalf of an Australian company who were, in earnest, fighting the Age of AI. I will not name them here — because they are a distant blob in my rear-view mirror. What I will say is that the pitch was polished, the product was sincere in its intent, and the gap between what we were promising and what we could deliver was wide enough to drive a bus through.
The pitch went something like this — future readiness is the only readiness that matters, emotional intelligence is the skill of the century, human skills are what AI cannot replace.
I believed some of it. I needed to believe more of it than I did, because there was a revenue target behind me and a Vice Chancellor in front of me who had clearly heard this kind of thing before.
He let me finish. Then he asked, quietly: "How do you know that this 48-hour program will make my students get jobs?"
I gave him something about outcomes and frameworks and global research. He listened. Then he asked the only question that has stayed with me since.
"Have you met my students? They can't speak a line in English."
I did not have an answer. Nobody in that room did.
We had a programme. We had a brochure. We had annexures and module maps and a gamified app. What we did not have was any honest engagement with the specific, diagnosable, addressable problem sitting in that university's classrooms.
The Vice Chancellor was not being difficult. He was asking the only question that matters in any training conversation — what is the actual problem?
Not what does the mandate require. Not what does the vendor promise. What is broken, specifically, and does this programme fix that specific thing?
The CPD industry never starts there. It starts with the programme and works backwards to manufacture the need.
CBSE's Notification TRG-02/2025 mandates 25 hours of Continuous Professional Development per teacher per year. Schools need compliance. Vendors need revenue.
The result is a market built not on outcomes but on obligation.
I have built exactly this kind of programme. I know how it works because I worked on how it works. Twenty-five hours of workshops, mapped to annexures, packaged for OASIS portal submission, certified and filed.
The programme exists because the mandate created a market. Not because anyone sat down and asked — what do teachers in this school actually need right now?
Here is what they need. And it is not another workshop.
A teacher managing 40 students, five periods a day, administrative reporting, board exam coordination, parent communication, and a CPD mandate on top of all of it — does not have a knowledge problem.
She has a time problem.
She has a tools problem.
More training adds to the load it claims to fix. It is the same logic I wrote about with Kamath and ICICI — more volume as the answer to a structural problem. Keep growing the book until the losses become someone else's problem.
The losses here are the students. And they are accumulating quietly.
What would actually change something is infrastructure that gives time back.
A diagnostic tool that tells you, in thirty seconds, where a student's understanding broke down — so you are not spending an hour guessing and another hour on a worksheet that addresses the wrong gap.
An assessment tool that cuts the mechanical work of building a quality exam from twenty hours to twenty minutes.
Curriculum intelligence that means you do not have to excavate a 200-page PDF to find what you are supposed to teach next Tuesday.
The Vice Chancellor's question — have you met my students — is only answerable if you have tools that let you actually see them.
Not their marks. Not their compliance. Not whether they submitted the activity on time.
What they understood, what they didn't, and exactly where the gap opened up.
A workshop cannot tell you that.
A workshop cannot even ask the question.
It arrives with the answer already printed in the workbook and leaves before it finds out whether any of it landed.
I was in that sales call selling something I knew, in the part of me that was still honest, that could not answer the VC's question.
He knew it too. He bought nothing, which was the right decision.
The difference between then and now is that the question finally has an answer.
It is just not a workshop.
Next up: Every school claims to personalise learning. None of them can. Here is why the promise is structurally impossible — and what personalisation actually requires.