Employable Skills

Training yourself in hair, beauty or nails is not enough. you need to ensure that your training also lands you a good job. Dinesh Sood, MD and Co-founder, Orane international, talks about how to impart employable skills to beauty students.

As per the National Policy on Skill Development and Entrepreneurship 2015, we have a target to impart skills to 40 crore people. Notwithstanding all efforts aimed at skilling, reskilling and up-skilling, the shortage of manpower with employable skills remains a serious challenge. It is also a huge opportunity for varied stakeholders. It is all about aligning the entire skilling ecosystem with the needs of employment markets.

A mismatch between the needs of the employers and the skills of job seekers proves a critical hindrance in carrying out manufacturing pursuits in particular and any other industrial activities in general. Over 150 million young people in developing countries are skilled but unemployed. As per the assessment of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy reported in December 2022, youth unemployment rates are two to four times higher than those of adults. Around 33 per cent of trained youth is unemployed as their employability quotient is very poor.

There are multiple repercussions of not having a skilled workforce in adequate quantity to meet the market needs. Quality, quantity and supplies are always a casualty. Because of high competition from the global players, we cannot compromise the quality and content under any circumstances. As a result, the production cost goes up since more time is consumed by the semi-skilled workforce in delivering the final factory yields. Even they need proper training and handholding to operate machines. Thus, the lack of required skills among job seekers is a double whammy for industries.

The Way Out

Inadequacies in skills are directly linked to the kind of education that is being imparted right from the school level, and the ecosystem we put in place to equip every job seeker with some kind of skills. If someone wishes to be a carpenter, he needs to have undergone at least a certificate course for which we need to have a skill training centre in every high school where job seekers should be trained in the fields of their interest during non-school hours. All skill courses at school levels must be synchronised with employment for a wholesome integration between skill providers and industries will be of paramount importance.

The high level of unemployment is often associated with the failure of the education system in generating graduates equipped with employable skills. Over 65 per cent of India’s working population is in the age group of 15-30 years. The current capacity of skill development programmes is 3.1 million and yet India has set a target of skilling 500 million by 2022. Currently, 90 per cent of the jobs in India are skillbased, a sharp contradiction to the current figure of only 6 per cent trained workforce in the country.

The new National Education Policy-2020 (NEP-2020) intends to increase the gross enrolment ratio in higher education including vocational education to 50 per cent by 2035 by adding 3.50 crore new seats to higher education institutions (HEIs). The NEP-2020 also talks of integrating vocational education with mainstream education and multiple entries and exit with appropriate certification. Multidisciplinary Education and Research Universities (MERUs) at par with IITs and IIMs will be set up. It is important to note that the NEP-2020 talks of ‘no hard separation between the ‘vocational and academic streams. Universal access to all children of the country to quality holistic education including vocational education from preschool to Grade XII should be ensured while allowing for flexibility and choice of subjects. Since skill-driven industries in the unorganised sector get the overwhelming percentage of workers from rural and semiurban areas, there is a pressing need to ensure that they carry some amount of employable skills at any cost.

What is Needed?

• Schools, colleges and universities should equip their students with relevant skills which enhance their employability

• Their curriculum must consist among other things employability quotient so that every learner has some skills to fall back on

• Youth from Punjab and other states rush to Canada, the UK and other countries based on the IELTS band, a language test, which does not ensure their employability

• For want of matching skills, they have been underemployed for overseas •State government’s employment exchanges should partner with the private sector at the block level to identify labour market demand PBHJ

About the author: Dinesh Sood is Co-founder and MD, Orane International; and Training Partner with National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC).