7 things to know about India’s skilling sector

1. What are skills?

Skills have multiple meanings and many elements.

• Basic literacy, numeracy and ICT skills
• Core employability or soft skills: language and communication, application of numbers, team work, problem solving, learning to learn 
• Higher order skills: logic, reasoning, analysis, synthesis, statistics
• Vocational, technical, academic skills: technical knowledge including enterprise, business know-how, financial skills
• Attitudinal and behavioural skills: initiative, confidence, willingness, perseverance, determination, positive thinking
• Life skills: social, health, interpersonal skills

2. Let’s look at some Stats

More than 54% of the total population of India is below 25 years of age. Over 62% of the population is in the working age group (15-59 years). Skill development efforts will decide if the demographic dividend of the country will become an asset or a liability.

Only 10% of the total workforce in the country receive some kind of skill training – 2% with formal training and 8% with informal training. India lags far behind in imparting skill training as compared to other countries. Formal skill training of the workforce in India is 2.3% in India compared to 68% in UK, 75% in Germany, 52% in USA, 80% in Japan and 96% in South Korea.  

3. Overview of India’s skill development 

In 2009, the Government formulated the national skill development policy that laid the framework for skill development in the country. Projecting that by 2022, India’s working-age population will reach 700 million, of whom, 500 million will need to be skilled, the Government set a national target of skilling 500 million people by then, allocating increased budgets for skill development in its 12th Five-year plan. It plans to increase the capacity of training institutions to 15 million (currently 2.5 million), by setting up more  Industrial Training Centres (ITIs), encouraging the private sector to engage in vocational training, and expanding tertiary education (GOI, 2009).

Seventeen Ministries of  the Government of  India are presently engaged in undertaking different training initiatives. The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) has been set up to enable skills-related training through its private-sector partners. India is perceived to be emerging as a service-driven economy with quality human capital as its competitive advantage. It is expected that 65% jobs would be created  in the services sector. India needs to develop new mechanisms and institutional structures to prepare a skilled workforce for the services sector.

4. Implementing  a skilling program

There are persisting gaps between design and implementation of programs. Important considerations have to be made across the entire spectrum of skilling – from designing programs to mobilisation of trainees, from counselling to enrolment, from the delivery of training to finding jobs and eventually understanding the final outcome which is sought. This will make programs scalable and sustainable. 

• Understand who the learner is: Participants of skill development programs differ across geographies and economic, education and social profiles vary. Programs need to be customised for learners according to their background, interests, goals, inner competencies, abilities, ambitions and aspirations. Some issues that learners face are low education levels, lack of awareness regarding job opportunities, no long term career progression vision, etc.

• A facilitator shapes the program: Control structures and mechanisms should be in place to ensure the quality of delivery by trainers in classrooms. Workshops and team building sessions should be organised to ensure that the passion of the organisation’s leadership gets passed on to team members and facilitators.

• Larger contextual issues of health, societal and family background should be considered: Training should not be explored in an isolated fashion but it should be recognised that social attitudes and culture play an important role.

• The rural economy and the jobs it has the potential to create should be studied and understood in a comprehensive manner: The skilling sector mainly caters to urban areas, populations and trades and most practices with regard to duration of programs, pedagogy and curriculum is urban. There are no differentiating factors between skill programs for rural and urban economies, which are starkly different from each other.

5. What can be done better?

• Build careers and not just provide low cadre jobs. Not only focus on participants getting a job but they should be able to retain a job and have life long learning opportunities to progress. 
• Stop focusing on last option sectors and low level trades. We need to look at creating ‘blue collar’ jobs which add to the overall sense of belonging, pride and self worth among people of the country. This will help to change people’s perceptions about vocational training. 
• Provide for full productive work in the economy which will take advantage of the large human resource pool available.
• Work towards increasing participant readiness to undertake skill training by improving the quality of education along with increasing and strengthening career counselling platforms
• Increase our efforts to improve the quality of trainers in the country by establishing trainer schools. This will not only provide for employment to the youth but shall also create wholesome skill development programs with qualified trainers. 

6. Technical skills need to be supplemented with life skills

A learner should be equipped with skills which enables them to think, aspire, strive for self growth and recognise their potential. Without these skills any kind of vocational training will not achieve long term impact or transformational change. Life skills can be broadly viewed in the Abilities, Skills and Knowledge (ASK) framework. It is generally agreed that qualities such as empathy, ownership, aspirations, confidence, etc.  outline the character of a person. Life skills should be built into programs and introduced at the conceptual stage so that along with vocational skilling there is a positive change in attitudes of participants.

7. Rethink entrepreneurship 

Even though entrepreneurship holds tremendous potential to transform rural economies, it does not receive the attention it deserves. The new schemes and policies in place for social development like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan have created new jobs in the labour market like masons, activists, water and sanitation advocates, etc. It is realised that not all hailing from villages in India are enterprising and entrepreneurial ventures alone cannot solve the deep rooted social issues, but the potential of entrepreneurship cannot be ignored. Heavy handholding is required to initiate and scale up these ventures, which is why most organisations focus on quicker and easily implemented skill programs. A new rural context to entrepreneurship should be studied and models should be developed which fuel small local businesses.

This blog is written by Anubha Singh, Research Associate at 4th Wheel Social Impact.