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Bridging The gap Between Education and Employment

Reetika Bose
Reetika Bose Nov 30 2017 - 3 min read
Bridging The gap Between Education and Employment
This would potentially lead to a growing middle class which would push India as one of world’s fastest growing knowledge-based economies.

India is projected to be the youngest country in the world by 2020, with approximately half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 26. This would potentially lead to a growing middle class which would push India as one of world’s fastest growing knowledge-based economies. To enable today’s Indian youth, 1.2 crore people must be skilled for them to finally enter the professional job market.

Skill development has been considered one of the critical aspects for job creation in India. Skills based education is marred by multiple access barriers like limited infrastructure facilities, quality of training, rigid entry requirements, lack of financial support, and negative perceptions.

Challenges in the Skill Industry

Quantity: For a billion plus people country which though is the second largest supplier of skilled manpower to the world and boasts of over 65% of the total population below 35 years, having a robust skills training and certification system which reaches out to most if not all people is a mammoth task.

Quality: Given the volumes and highly input oriented training systems often students completing their skills diploma’s and certificates are not attuned to the industry and application of these skills. Quality of delivery, instruction, and outout hence mars productivity resulting in on the job losses for the industry, slowing down the economic activity sometime derailing the growth engine.

Access: India has a very large geographical spread, difficult terrain and varying social economic conditions which make implementation of standardised, quality control skill instruction a huge challenge. Learners often have no access to training programs due to the inability to pay fees or entry barriers to training.

Measures adopted

Introducing special mechanisms in the delivery of training to increase participation by women, including mobile training units, extension schemes, and in-plant training;

Monitoring progress in increasing the participation and integration of women in training and employment and holding training institutions accountable for equitable intake of women;

Significantly expanding training provisions for rural poor, youth, and vulnerable groups in rural areas. This could be achieved through greater equitable integration into existing institutions, structures and facilities;

Promoting training in non-traditional fields for women through the establishment of specific training programmes and pilot support schemes; training programmes for women and rural poor could include personal development and life skills training modules and literacy training;

Increasing the pool of women trainers and provide certification for training

Designing targeted interventions to address vulnerable groups such as people with disabilities, to increase their economic empowerment;

Combining income skills training with provision of technical inputs, credit and supplies, careful selection of students that are capable of using the supplies and providing continuous support and mentoring schemes;

Introducing more work-based learning and linking trainees with mentors/masters to gain experience of a specific trade; integrating business, self-employment and entrepreneurial concepts into training activities, especially in follow-up phases, and search for trainers with relevant backgrounds and familiarity with both the formal and informal sector.

Experts speak

In an interview with the former CEO, National Skill Development Corporation, Mr. Dilip Chenoy, he said, “If you look at the skill space and if you look at the data by the AICC website report, you have some org are able to do 85-90 placements. Other organisations have a lower rate say like 35-40%. There are many reasons why a person doesn’t take up jobs in India. People prefer learning a skill, based on their future perspective because everybody in India wants to get a degree, for they believe that once you have a degree, there is a higher probability of employment in the public sector. So that’s the challenge in this sector.”

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