Jugaad Is Not a Skill: The difference between operating dysfunction and building capability

Most of us of a certain age grew up with those massive CRT televisions. They lasted forever. Often twenty years or more. And towards the end of their life, every single one of them had a method to make it work. Knock the side. Tap the top. Tilt it slightly. Shake it just enough, and suddenly the picture came back.

Every household had its own trick.

In Hindi/Urdu, we call this jugaad. A clever workaround. A practical hack that gets things moving again.

But let us be honest. That was not engineering. It was workaround folklore. And that “skill” did not transfer to anything else. Knowing how to hit your TV in a specific spot did not help you fix a radio, a fridge, or the next television you bought.

The same thing happens in careers.

Many people spend years inside one organisation and become extremely good at operating its broken machinery. Fragile processes. Political shortcuts. Undocumented hacks. Legacy workflows that only survive because someone knows which lever to pull or which person to message.

That is organisational jugaad. It looks like competence. It feels like expertise. But it is often deeply local. Move to another company, and the cracks are different. The wiring fault is not in the same place. The hidden switch behind the panel does not exist.

And that is when the shock arrives: “I have fifteen years of experience. Why is this not valued here?”

Because experience operating dysfunction is not the same as building capability. This is why skill security matters. And this is why a skill audit has to be brutally honest.

Ask yourself:

• Am I learning principles or memorising workarounds?
• Am I building methods or depending on quirks?
• Am I solving problems or navigating around them?

This is why I wrote "Your Resume Isn’t the Problem, Your Skills Might Be." It will be increasingly difficult to stay relevant in an ever-changing world; you get rewarded for solving hard problems.

Jugaad keeps things running. But it does not compound. Real skills transfer. Workarounds do not.

You need to think about making yourself redundant before someone else does.

I write weekly on different topics related to Data and AI. Feel free to subscribe to FAQ on Data newsletter and/or follow Fawad Qureshi on LinkedIn or FawadQureshi on X.