How do Indians advance in life?

They use different routes:

• Some use the power of education to get well paying jobs and then rise up the socio-economic ladder
• Some get jobs abroad and are able to remit money back home
• Some others manage to get entry-level white-collar jobs (in sectors like retail and hospitality) by learning basic English
• While some try their hand at starting something of their own​

Imagine trying to communicate something as unwieldy as the above on one slide using those four bullet points.​

Good luck trying to get your audience to remember it.​

Which is why, Sajith Pai and Amal Vats at Blume, decided to make it easier to communicate in their recently released ‘Indus Valley Annual Report 2022‘, which I also profiled yesterday.​

Here’s how they decided to ‘package’ this pattern – about how Indians advance in life.​

Presenting the 3Es (make that 4) of socio-economic advancement in India

What is the storytelling technique here?​​

Similar to the example featuring the 5Ds of a CEO’s job, this one:

• Discerns the pattern of key factors that enable socio-economic advancement
• Makes clever use of words to convert the factors into a mnemonic​

After a few weeks or months, you may forget the details of the numbers in this slide. But you will remember: English, Exams and Exits!​

Other quick points on techniques used in this slide:

• Show don’t just tell: The picture of the ad for ‘Spoken English’ training by the Delhi government is much better than just text about the same
• Norm and variance: The contrast between the number of seats and the number of exam applicants; also the massive increase in students going abroad (a 10X increase in 20 years translates to a decent 12.2% CAGR)
• The use of a simple column chart to depict the increase

​

#SOTD 33