India’s steady economic growth over the last few years has created multiple opportunities for the country’s youth, who are looking beyond the traditional options of engineering, medicine or law when it comes to pursuing a career. Across sectors such as aviation, telecom, insurance, information technology, manufacturing, retail or real estate, there are several emerging areas providing excellent options for career-seekers.
The surge of opportunities in these areas has translated into a huge demand for employable talent. Though there is no dearth of talent in this country, employable talent or the talent with the right set of skills and abilities for a particular job is still a question mark. It is important for all stakeholders—the industry, students, academia, government and entrepreneurs—to collectively address this issue and abolish the term “employability” from our lexicon. MeritTrac was conceived in 2000 as an entrepreneurial venture to help individuals and organizations quantitatively measure and improve employable skills. The foundations of the business plan of MeritTrac can be traced to the premise that I am sharing with you—that there are several possibilities that exist in the “employability” space, especially given the rapid growth of the services economy. I see terrific opportunities for entrepreneurs to step in and create business models which help individuals identify their strengths, map it to careers, hone their skills through customized, modularized training and eventually become employable. Though there are several “training” institutes, placement agencies and job portals—all of them operating in their own silos without really integrating offerings right across the talent supply chain.
The first step in this supply chain is initiating the career selection procedure at an earlier stage. Today, typically a student starts exploring career options after class X. In a cut-off driven education system, percentage of marks alone decides which stream the student should be opting for, and this trend continues through further years. There needs to be a fundamental change in the approach; instead of marks alone, the interest and abilities of individuals must play a central role in their choosing a particular career path. When individuals have the chance to pursue something that interests them and they have the required skills, it helps them reach greater heights.
The next important step is to ensure a synergy between industry expectations and academic output. The onus lies equally on the academia and the industry to come together and share both sides of the story on a regular basis. For every industry, there are specific and generic skills requirements, which the industry has to provide as inputs to the academia. The academia then creates a curriculum that addresses the need of the industry along with providing strong knowledge base to the students. This process helps produce employable graduates from our institutions, helping the industry cut down on the induction training time.
Further to identifying and developing employable skills, it is also critical to hone such skills on a regular basis. As today’s businesses are supported by technologies that change every now and then, one has to be in tune with such changes even to survive, if not succeed, when it comes to such emerging careers. In this context, any entrepreneur who wants to be successful in this space has to provide services that achieve tangible outcomes for a student.
The outcome itself can be defined as a step or a series of steps that students can climb on the path to achieving their aspirations. The number of graduates we produce as a nation speaks for itself. Every year we churn out over 3 million graduates from various streams—engineering, science, arts, commerce and so on. Various studies have pointed to a 10-25% employability rate. I urge all of you to do the math and figure out the enormity of the problem—and aren’t all problems opportunities in disguise??!
Madan Padaki is co-founder and director, MeritTrac Services.
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