The Importance of Skill Development

By: Ranvir Singh

‘It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill’
— Wilbur Wright

In this rapid world of automation, only those will survive who have required skills. In the earlier times, the skills of doing were passed down through generations, from father to son, from mother to daughter with very little scope for development. But today, the machines have changed the ground rules. Only those can survive who have been well trained and open to change and adapt. Now, what does being skilled really mean? According to a website investopedia.com, being skilled means ‘having specialized know-how, training, and experience to carry out more complex physical or mental tasks than routine job functions’. It helps in getting a high paying job.

In India, there is a dual challenge for the government to fulfill their promise of jobs for everyone. The first challenge is the severe paucity of highly-trained, quality labor, and the second being unemployability of large sections of the educated workforce that posses little or no job skills. In other words, it is a case of demand and supply mismatch. Even if we manage to attract investments from big companies like Boeing, Foxconn, etc. as being targeted to make their products in India, the unemployability of our workforce is a huge setback as companies like these make sophisticated products that require well-trained and highly skilled workforce.

As of now, the ground reality is that there is a huge gap between the formal education system and industry requirements, compounding the above challenge. According to the Labour Bureau study for 2013–14, only 6.8 percent of persons aged 15 years and above have received or were receiving vocational training, of which only 2.8 percent was through formal channels. In other words, the formally skilled workforce is less than 3 percent of the total workforce. The workforce with higher education also faces job threat in cases when they fail to upgrade their skills with the change in the requirements of the industry. According to a report by an executive search firm ‘Head Hunters’, the IT industry, India’s most famed industry, will be removing 6 lakh employees over the next 3 years. These will be those whose skills have not been able to keep pace with the rapidly changing technology.

As India strengthens its base as a knowledge economy, there would be an additional requirement of the highly skilled workforce in sectors like financial services, IT/ITes, biotechnology, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals. There is also a huge gap between the industry requirements and the outdated academic curriculum of our colleges. For bridging this gap, AICTE has launched a new curriculum with more emphasis on applied skills and industry related work rather than plain theory. Being skilled would be essential to be in this race to get jobs and make the workforce employable.