How can India tool up for the jobs of the future?

Visitors to India are usually delighted – and frequently stumped – by her endless contradictions. While we Indians take most of that in our stride, here’s something that’s got us baffled too.

With nearly 500 million workers, India currently has the second largest labour resource pool in the world, and is expected to go one better by 2030. And yet, the country is facing a serious talent shortage.

The 2015 edition of an annual talent survey of nearly 42,000 employers in 42 countries found that 58 percent of Indian employers were facing a skills shortage, struggling to fill vacancies in functions ranging from finance and IT to administration and office support.

One in four graduates in the world is a product of the Indian education system. India is a significant contributor to global research, 23 of our universities now figure in the global top 200, and we’ve produced 6 Nobel Laureates in the past two decades. And yet, only a small fraction of our graduating engineers are employable.

Demographic dividend – or disaster?

The acute shortage of skills is a recurring theme in every sector, industry and profession in India today. This is a problem that needs to be addressed urgently, failing which, India, which will create a 40-50 million strong manpower surplus by 2025, will quickly see its demographic dividend turn into demographic disaster.

That is clearly easier declared than done, when you consider the size of the problem – the need to ensure we have 700 million skilled workers by 2022 to meet demand, when currently, less than 4 percent of our workforce is skilled and the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education is a dismal 21 percent.

Obviously, the solution(s) will also have to be of a similar order of magnitude. A good example is the recently launched National Skill Development Mission, which will offer a strong institutional framework at the National and State levels to facilitate the skills training of 402 million workers over seven years.

Jobs of the future – everyone’s job

But we cannot expect the Government to do everything. Industry, academia and even citizens must shoulder some of this vast responsibility. The success of the World Economic Forum’s Regional Skills Initiative in other parts of the world shows how important collaboration between business, government, civil society and the training and education sector is for mitigating the skills shortage. Hence cross-sector collaborations, such as those promoted by the Industry Institute Partnership Cell at AICTE, or the UGC’s Encore scheme, are really welcome.

Equally welcome are the latest technologies, which can give wings to our nation’s skills agenda by providing highly innovative educational solutions, enabling remote learning at scale, and bringing down the costs of training and education to a fraction of the bricks and mortar model.

A number of IT companies are leveraging their technological strengths to make a useful contribution, be it Cisco whose Networking Academy is trying to bridge the digital divide by spreading technical education in rural and educationally backward parts of India, Intel which will work with the Indian Government to inculcate digital skills among millions of citizens, or the Google – Udacity – Tata alliance offering online technical training courses.

Infosys, my own company, has also been very active on this front. Consciously nurturing a culture of continuous learning and training is an integral part of our company. While we have one of the largest corporate training universities in the world, skilling our teams in subjects ranging from Design Thinking to Business Management to Artificial Intelligence, we are also supporting a number of external initiatives to improve India’s technical skills at the grassroots.

Campus Connect is our flagship industry-academia partnership program, which has so far benefited nearly 12,000 faculty members and over 330,000 students from 348 engineering institutions. We also have a one-day Rural Reach Program for creating awareness about computers and IT among rural school children. “SPARK Guru” works with government schoolteachers to enhance their teaching skills, while “Catch Them Young” trains bright eighth-grade students for ten days during annual vacation time.

The youngest population in the world

In five years, India will have the youngest population in the world, of which 64% will be of working age; in fifteen, one-third of the world’s working age population will belong to India, according to a KPMG report, Indian Higher Education, Shifting the Paradigm. But that opportunity will come to nought unless we do something about the acute skills shortage facing the country.

There is no easy solution to this problem. It will take a huge, concerted effort on several fronts starting from imparting basic education at the grassroots to improving employability among fresh graduates to reskilling the already employed, to move the needle. And underlying it all will have to be deep, strong and long-term collaboration among all stakeholders.

Author: Pravin Rao is Chief Operating Officer at Infosys and Issue Chair for the World Economic Forum’s National Strategy Day on India in New Delhi.

Image: Employees walk in front of a building dubbed the “washing machine”, a well-known landmark built by Infosys at the Electronics City IT district in Bangalore, February 28, 2012. REUTERS/Vivek Prakash