How can industry play a role in making the youth job-ready?
As India braces toward achieving a $5 trillion GDP by this decade, there is a challenge in bridging the skills gap in the country today. According to Govt figures, out of the 15 million youth entering the workforce each year, 75 percent of them are not job-ready or, rather, are unemployable. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the unemployment rate reached 34% among the 20-24 year-olds in 2019. At least eight million new job seekers enter the job market every year. The data also suggests that only 2.3% of the workforce in India has undergone formal skill training compared to 68% in the UK, 75% in Germany, and 52% in the USA. And as technology becomes even more pervasive than ever before and job roles evolve, there is a strong call from the industry for the government to bridge this skill gap.
Future Skills and Jobs
in the future.
In 2015 the Govt had launched the Skill India Mission to create convergence across sectors and states in terms of skill training activities and to achieve the vision of ‘Skilled India to address the issue of skill development amongst the youth. The new education policy does lay a lot of emphasis on skilling at the school level.
Role of Industry
As Knowledge Partner: While the government has a huge role to play in revitalising the skilling sector in India, the industry and academia also need to be involved deeply in skilling the emerging youth force. As a knowledge partner, the industry’s role is important as it is in the best position to forecast the new emerging job roles as well as those that may become redundant in the future.
Being a Curriculum Partner
Industry must participate in the curriculum design with the academia. Most successful skilling systems work with designing the curriculum with inputs from district industry-first followed by state and finally the nation. This approach not only ensures a better understanding of job opportunities from the district to the national level by the students but also ensures that the industry can find the required talent from district to state to the national level.
Increase Industry Participation: Indian Industry must step forward and take ownership of grooming the talent by providing them with hands-on learning and support on their premises.
The government should look at building innovative industrysupporting schemes in this direction. We need to learn from technical and vocational training/education models in Germany, Japan, Brazil, and Singapore, which had similar challenges in the past.
The industry must come forward and convert the college lab to production floors so that the students learn the end-toend part of the value chain. For this to happen, the industry will need to build shop floors and workshops at the institute.
To ensure implementation of the above-mentioned points, policy intervention by the govt will be required to enable academia and industry to set up the infrastructure and curriculum. The government will also need to amend the apprenticeship act to allow easy internships and incentivise the industry and academia to give easy apprenticeships to students. For this, the new education policy should develop attractive incentives and internship policies for the industry, academia, and students.