By Gaurav Bhagat, Founder, Gaurav Bhagat Academy
India, a nation which boasts world’s largest youth population, stands at a crossroads of immense potential and pressing challenges. A study conducted by National Skill Development Corporation pointed out skill gaps in high-demand sectors including information technology, health care, manufacturing, agriculture and renewable energy suggesting that there was need of skill, up-skill, and right-skill for the country’s youth. To equip youth of this for a competitive world, the emphasis needs to be put on skilling since the school days. A well-educated and skilled workforce is not just a cornerstone of economic growth but also a catalyst for social progress and national development.
The Skill Gap: A Persistent Challenge
Despite India’s impressive strides in education, a significant skill gap persists, which stands as an obstacle in employment and economic growth. India Skills Report pointed out that only 49 per cent of the Indian youth is employable. A leading Indian engineering and construction multinational conglomerate revealed last year that when they advertised for freshers’ role in the year 2022 they could only give offer letters to 1,500 engineering students out of 75,000 applications. Later, the selected engineers also went through a one-year induction training program. The conglomerate disclosed that they have spent over 100 crore rupees in the last couple of years in training of the hires to make them employable. According to TeamLease, there are over 500 million Indians in the working age and one out of two are not employable due to skill gap. This mismatch between academic qualifications and industry requirements has led to a supply and demand imbalance in the job market.
NEP 2020: A Transformative Steps
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, a landmark policy initiative, recognizes the critical importance of skill development in India’s education system. It aims to foster a futuristic skilled workforce ecosystem by reshaping education by integrating vocational training from Class 6 onwards. Simultaneously, NEP also puts a special emphasis on academic collaboration with industries which will ensure that the courses are tailored to meet market demands. In fact, employability is one of the focuses of NEP 2020, which recognises the role of education in equipping students with required skillset. It calls for a creative and multidisciplinary curriculum that gives equal importance to humanities, sports and fitness, languages, culture, arts and crafts, in addition to science and mathematics. We often make the mistake of considering only hard skills, which are basically operational, as the only required skills. But NEP underscores that soft skills such as communication, cooperation, teamwork and resilience, as ‘life skills’. Soft skills take companies up the value chains as these are required in every aspects of business form hiring to handling clients.
Other Key Initiatives
Kids spend their formative years in schools acquiring knowledge from books mostly. This knowledge helps the students develop their personalities, but fails to equip them with practical skills for the real world. The technological speed is outpacing the syllabus of traditional education system. Hence, the foundation of skill developed should be built at schools itself. Student must be encouraged to think beyond the grades as each one of them has unique interest, personality and creativity. It is very common in an Indian household where a child’s unique talent goes unnoticed. Therefore, schools should be at the forefront to create an environment to support and celebrate this uniqueness. Create enough opportunities for kids to participate in activities like sports, arts and crafts, coding, science experiments, music, storytelling to develop skills like public speaking, teamwork, leadership and time management. It will not only help active students to reach their maximum potential but the shy one also will discover a new interest. It will also build the importance of a lifelong learning spirit among the children and arm them with necessary skills for real world and also ease them in new situations.
Conclusion
Emphasizing skill-based education is crucial for India’s future. Not addressing skill gap could create serious blockade for India and its dream of becoming a five trillion dollar economy. It could result in revenue loss, lower productivity and unprofitable delays in new product launch, just to name a few, which eventually make us lose our ground to the competing countries. By equipping its youth with the necessary skills, India can unlock its immense potential, drive economic growth, and create a more equitable and just society. However, sustained efforts and collaboration between the government, industry, and academia are essential to achieve lasting success.
