Apprenticeships for an automation-resilient India

Apprenticeships are a mechanism to train prospective practitioners of a given trade or profession through on-the-job training and vocational education programmes, the proportion of which varies depending upon the trade, policy framework and priorities of individual nations.

Apprenticeships bring benefits to both employers and young apprentices in several ways.

For employers, apprenticeships develop a pool of highly skilled workers whose training is customised to ensure it meets the respective industry standards, and the requirements of businesses.

Further, it ensures that the workers develop skills that are up-to-date in terms of changes in technologies and dynamics of the marketplace, especially crucial in a world that is increasingly influenced by automation and a concomitant demand for highly skilled employees.

Through apprenticeships, employers are further benefited by an increase in their workforce’s productivity, as well as a reduction in the costs incurred on recruiting fresh workers since young apprentices can be relied upon to be optionally absorbed once their training has been completed.

This is complemented by the fact that retention of apprentices once they are recruited as employees would also be high.

The link between classroom and workplace training that is achieved through apprenticeships remarkably benefits youngsters and prepares them to withstand the pulls and pressures of a global marketplace where relevant skills are more likely to be imbibed dynamically if acquired by learning at the workplace.

Further, young apprentices benefit from supporting stipends that act as a financial cushion in the interim while they prepare to enter the job market equipped with stable remunerative employment contracts that ensure decent work standards and social security arrangements.

Given the hurdle of minimum experience that several recent university graduates are increasingly finding harder to overcome, young apprentices are better qualified given their training itself included a sizeable component of work experience.

Moreover, in the context of developing countries, the quality of jobs is also enhanced by apprenticeships by way of greater formality of employment that directly benefits young apprentices, gives them stability at an early stage in their careers, and drastically reduces the risk of unemployment.

FOR EMPLOYERS, APPRENTICESHIPS DEVELOP A POOL OF HIGHLY SKILLED WORKERS WHOSE TRAINING IS CUSTOMISED TO ENSURE IT MEETS THE INDUSTRY STANDARDS

Young people in India prefer to go to university as opposed to taking up apprenticeships. In fact, the number of apprentices when viewed against the massive size of India’s workforce is abysmally low, which is an even more alarming reality since India is in a favourable demographic phase.

For a country with a population of 1.3 billion, India finds itself at the cusp of a demographic opportunity with an overwhelmingly large proportion of its populace that can be classified as young.

There are several reasons for this choice, which are rooted in social and cultural perceptions of a university education as the panacea to a youth’s prospects in life.

Significant financial capital is invested by a family in an Indian youth’s non-governmental university education assuming he or she reaches that stage on the educational ladder.

A university education has traditionally been viewed as so crucial given the historical understanding of Indians that a stable, self-sufficient and decent form of employment can only be secured through mainstream higher education, and even further strengthened if such a higher education results in a professional degree.

An inordinately high number of private engineering, medical, and management colleges have mushroomed in India, which while meeting the demand of Indian households to attain a ‘professional’ qualification, at the same time offer questionable outcomes and are often of poor quality in terms of teaching and infrastructure.

The desire to achieve this unreasonable standard has severely compromised the ability of Indian youth to find decent employment opportunities since the over-supply of poor-quality candidates has far overshot Indian industry’s requirements, even more so in the context of increasing automation, which calls for highly skilled applicants.