The skilling-academics divide must be broken
With the advent of the new-age economy, the work landscape is in transition. As a result, there is an increasing demand from the education and skill ecosystems to prepare for this change.
The high drop-out rates of students after completing secondary education impact the intended productivity gains of the economy. At the same time, many industry leaders complain about the persistent employability gap of pass-outs from higher education institutions. To address these issues, the government has identified the integration of vocational education and application-based learning with general education as the key reform in the education-skill system.
These issues have been highlighted in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which envisages quality holistic education — including vocational education. The policy recommends incorporating vocational skills into schools and higher education curriculums to attain 50% vocational exposure for children by 2025.
With the implementation of NEP 2020, four critical paradigms are being implemented to realise holistic education and skilling:
First, a unified credit framework will be able to address the credit assignment and credit transfer of a variety of courses undertaken in different education settings as per identified notional hours, enabling credit transfers and vertical and horizontal mobility.
Second, the integrated skilling approach will drive convergence and optimal economic return from existing public investment in education-skilling infrastructure. As a first step, a skill hub pilot was launched in January. Around 5,000 such hubs have been identified across the education and skill ecosystems to enable the sharing of infrastructure and vocational resources to deliver skills training.
Third, the integration of vocational and application-based subjects in school curriculums. Students would be oriented to the world of work through exposure to practical training-oriented courses related to cognitive, mechanical, and interpersonal skills. These, combined with a counselling solution, would provide early signals of the student’s career orientation.
With the increasing integration of technology in learning in recent years, the time is ripe for adding the technology paradigm in the education, skilling and employment spaces. These initiatives can potentially address the existing inefficiencies of a heterogeneous and fragmented system.
The proposed Skill India platform will facilitate and enable individuals of all ages and at any level of their educational and professional career to make informed learning and career choices. It will have separate layers for API and verified credentials, financial inclusion, and opportunities. These layers will map the entire training life cycle of a citizen, including counselling, identity validation, career options, skills, linkages with financial applications, and credit and monitoring mechanisms. The digital infrastructure will be interoperable with the digital architecture of the education system, labour, and employment.
The government realises that the world of education and learning does not differentiate between academic and application-based knowledge. It is building an ecosystem to enable this at a national scale with the ethos of integrated, holistic education, convergence between various ministries/departments, and shared infrastructure, breaking the artificial divide that makes skilling a poor cousin to academics.