Currently India is the world’s fastest growing economy. That’s true and it’s also true that there are ample opportunities and jobs in the Indian marketplace, most of it thanks to globalization and the phenomenal IT boom during the past two decades. However, the good news ends there for the reality is that there are nearly 12 million Indians who enter the workforce every year and most are by and large not job-ready in the sense they are not equipped with the requisite skills and not competent enough to handle the challenges that comes with the job. To sum it up, there is a vast mismatch between jobs and skills, technically called competency gap which is a measure of an Indian employee’s proficiency.

This revelation does not mean that the Indian youth have never been skilled enough all along. It’s only that somewhere down the line over the years, the mismatch in skills-gap has dented the organic growth of the creative, ethical and positive energies of the Indian nation to be replaced by mere over-the-top ambitions of many Indian youths. End-result of this downslide is that today many companies in India have been complaining about the widening huge skill-gap that is prevalent among the thousands of Indians entering the workforce every year. Worse still, there has been a widening of the skills-gap even among those who have completed professional courses.

Factors Responsible For Growing Skills-Gap Mismatch: 

The graph for wide skills-gap in India keeps on increasing every day. The reason for this widening chasm is not because there is a dearth of jobs or a dearth of adequate opportunities or even a dearth of job-candidates, but a whole lot of factors as outlined below:

• The indifference and lack of enthusiasm and vision of earlier Indian Governments on uplifting educational standards with focus on enhancing the skills of Indian youth coming out of colleges and universities.
• Indian youth basically are more into clichéd academics and follow the same old stereotypes like engineering or MBA or Medicine or even banking.
• Tendency of parents to push their children towards white collar jobs due to an uncanny fear of trying out something new, or doing something that someone hasn’t done.
• Present education system does not focus enough on training students on the skill-sets that today’s industries demand and is also not holistic enough to train them to be prepared for something new.
• Indifferent approach of colleges and universities in India for significant collaborations with industry.  
• Inflexible curricula of colleges and universities with lack of experiential learning outside the classroom.
• Industry’s unwillingness to engage itself with colleges and universities outside the top few in a meaningful manner, restricting interactions to just pointless and at times, empty feedback.
• Marginal presence of globally outstanding universities as a result of which the number of skilled graduates is still very small.
• The yawning supply-demand lopsidedness. For instance, candidates from top management schools often have knowledge of numbers but no idea about the execution of the same knowledge in digital marketing.

According to one report, India will need around 700 million skilled workers by 2022 to meet the burgeoning demands of its growing economy. Present glaring skills imbalance due to lack of adequate technical and soft skills brings to fore a whole lot of questions like – What are the reasons for this abysmal deficit of skills? How do we tackle the skill deficit issue and what we need to do to bridge the yawning gap, make the Indians job-ready, focusing on young-graduates to augment their employability?

Tackling the Issue of Skills-Gap:

With India poised for a steep rise in economy in the coming decades, the need of the hour is to build an effective ecosystem that runs like a well-oiled machine working in tandem with each other to nourish and nurture the best possible skilled talents. 

• Effective Government policies with a robust support system that helps tap, build and eventually equip Indian youth with the requisite skills.
• Industries need to partner with educational institutions to develop the best skilled talent pool through dissemination of the right study materials and training.
• Education system loopholes need to be plugged and revamped with a focus on inquisitive thinking and problem-solving. For this the curriculum needs to be made more outcome-focused and skills well-integrated with regular mainstream education in schools.  
• Change in parent’s attitude in shaping the character and competence of their children, inculcating in them the need to be fearless, adaptable and resilient.

FICCI’s ‘Higher Education in India: Vision 2030’, also suggests a multi-pronged approach: research-focused institutions for high-quality research and innovation; career-focused institutions offering technical and professional courses that produce industry-ready graduates; and foundation institutions that offer a wide array of courses providing well-rounded education and skills relevant to local industry and communities.

Skilled workforce is a pre-requisite for a growing economy like India. To bridge the skills-gap, all the actors of the ecosystem from the Government to Industry, Educational institutions and others, need to join hands and focus on how best they can leverage the untapped talents of the Indian youth and channelize them to realize India’s true potential and position it as the skilled HR capital of the world.