Microsoft Sangam to help address skill gaps in India

Providing a major boost to Centre’s skill India mission, Microsoft on Tuesday announced the launch of project ‘Sangam’ and ‘Placements’ based on Linkedln that would help new college graduates and semi-skilled white-collar employees to upgrade skills and connect with potential recruiters.

The new initiatives from Microsoft aims to bridge the widening skill gap in the country.

It will enable blended online and offline, teaching and learning. The project aims to connect the skill learning programmes directly with relevant jobs, by leveraging the power of LinkedIn’s extensive job search platform.

Project Sangam will allow users to register using their Aadhaar identity, ensuring life-long access to the platform.

“We recognise that being able to create a more efficient way or more democratised way for new college graduates to find placements is one of the challenges in India. So this placement product would help any college graduate student from any college, not just those college that already have a reputation of access to big firms, to realise their potential based on who they are as against the college they attend. You can do your own assessment; you can make sure that your potential recruiters know who you are and what you are capable off. Doing this is just not enough. We now need to extend this (LinkedIn) to middle skill and low-skill, vocational training and for job opportunities for everyone,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.

Speaking at the company’s ‘Future Decoded’ event, Mr Nadella also announced the launch of Skype Lite that allows communication and collaboration over low-bandwidth networks.

The app will be available in seven local languages and would also bring Aadhaar integration to the app by June 2017.

With this integration, Skype users will be able to authenticate the identity of unknown callers in a variety of situations where identification verification is required, including job interviews, goods and property sale.

“If digital technology is only the purview of the large businesses and the start-ups, I think that is not sufficient for an economy to make progress," he said