Unemployment or Unemployable​ : The bigger challenge?

"Unemployment or Unemployable"​ : The bigger challenge?

There was some great feedback I received on my previous post on this subject and considering the statistics staring at us, it is clearer than ever that what needs fixing is 'unemployability'. 'Unemployability' is the illness and unemployment is merely a symptom. What we have been focused on thus far has been the symptom and therein lies our problem! Consider the following facts for a wider appreciation of the issue :

The Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) for Indian higher education has been just 33-34% as compared to developed countries that have a GER of 56%. In spite of this, close to 60 lakh students graduate every year in several disciplines. Very few of them are deemed fit for employment. Reports indicate that as many as 47% of Indian graduates are not qualified for any industry job and add to it the fact that surveys indicate 70% of our engineering graduates are not employable.

In the days of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) with an ever-evolving environment like that of the services industry, mere formal educational qualifications are not enough. It is necessary to have the relevant soft and hard skills which are allied to the dynamic changes in services as an industry as well as job roles. Recruiters today, also prefer candidates with high 'learnability', adaptability and 'scalability'. The lack of these qualities is becoming a strategic concern.

Employability will improve when the syllabus reflects the demands of the industry. A client I was dealing with personally in Karnataka approached us for help with hiring CNC machine operators. “We couldn’t find five good candidates against the company’s requirement of 50+. The skills required for the job are not taught in the five or six colleges which could meet their requirements”.

It has also not helped that India as an economy moved from the primary sector to the tertiary sector almost galloped to the tertiary sectors giving the job intensive Secondary sector a miss for various reasons...

There seems to be an inherent disconnect between curriculum-based learning at the institution level and the requisite ‘job ready’ skills needed by Indian corporates. Technical education in our country has grown into a large-sized system, offering opportunities for education and training in a wide variety of trades and disciplines at a certificate, diploma, degree, postgraduate degree and doctoral levels in institutions throughout the country. This doesn’t seem enough to make Indian ‘job – ready’.

The distressing news is that the problem of employability in India is rampant in both blue and white-collar jobs. So, what are the contributing factors to this disparity? Societal inequalities, inadequate education infrastructure, quality and lack of vocational education and lack of effective assessment of skills are some of the reasons why a majority of working class personnel in our country are not qualified for the jobs that they aspire for…Consider this : *Slightly more than half of India’s workers have school attainment below secondary school with no vocational training; * Of India’s current workforce, 31% are illiterate, 13% have a primary education, and 6% are college graduates; * About 2% of the workforce has formal vocational training, and 9% have non-formal, vocational training; * Out of the more than 500 thousand final year bachelors students aged 18–29 who were surveyed, 54% were found to be unemployable.

So, what is required?

One of the main problems lies in our system of imparting education and the subsequent assessment of additional soft skills and capabilities needed to survive in today’s competitive work atmosphere. Graduates often complain that they were not exposed to life skills training or internship opportunities during their graduation years, which would have prepared them for the real workplace scenario.

Thus, realizing the dream of modern India lies greatly with efficient ways of skilling, up-skilling and re-skilling of the country’s rising youth population. The larger question is whether governments both at the centre and states will be able to crack the unemployability problem, what kind of partnerships and models are required to bridge the gap? What are the models from other nations that can be replicated in India? What are the best practices that India is missing? 

Sanjiva Jha, CEO and Founder BroadArks