Currently in India, most of the fresh graduates lack the skills required by the IT industry, for which they are trained on- job or during intensive training sessions – which is a cost to the organization not just in terms of resource cost but also the time cost and opportunity cost. More importantly, even if some of the large corporates provide technical trainings, they do not address managerial skills. Managerial skills and alignment to org-culture can increase organization’s productivity and differentiate a successful organization from others.
We aspire to cater to the IT industry with ready solutions by investing in skill development for fresh graduates and getting them market ready. This can be a win-win situation for both the job seeker and the employer since better skills lead to career stability and growth. The trained graduates can be absorbed into our internal company projects or can be placed with our clients. Our second phase will focus on “re-skilling and/or up-skilling” the existing employees. These programs will be high on delivery – as they are an opportunity for us to showcase our capabilities to prospective clients. Though these programs will vary from 3 days to 30 days – they will target developing minimum one skill to at least beginner’s level within one day of enrollment for the program.
We are discussing Skill Development within IT sector alone, which is relevant to us. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), states the working age group between 15-59 years in India constitutes 62.5% of its population and is projected to increase to 65 % by 2036. This must be translated into proportionate employment opportunities; otherwise it may present a national challenge in terms of unemployment. Given the available infrastructure in India, this is possible only through a close collaboration between the private and public sectors. Only 6% of the engineering graduates get hired by the top IT companies. The skill gap is so huge that even the hired employees need retraining. So far, the onus of skill development lies with industry which comes at the cost of productivity.
By 2022, the Indian job market anticipates 104.62 million fresh entrants. So, India needs to create 8.1 million jobs every year, against the 5.5 million in 2017, in order to keep the job creation rate constant. The Indian economy is expected to rank no 3 in the world, after US and China, by the year 2030. However, along this economic growth, the unemployment rate is rising in India due to low skill intensity and its rudimentary education system lacking in skill development amongst its youth. Hardly 1/5th of the engineers who are graduating are considered fit for hiring. Moreover, the Indian IT sector is undergoing transition with increasing automation some jobs like coding are expected to see a cut. However, demand for jobs will pick up in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), digital space and smart technologies. To be ready for this change, the Indian IT sector will need to re-skill its employees.