Employment Tied To Quality Tech Education

Thrust should be on effectively preparing youth for a changing employment landscape.

- Debasish Bhattacharyya

According to Kris Lakshmikanth, Founder Chairman and MD of The Head Hunters India, the curriculum has not kept pace with the rapidly changing times and therefore vacancies can be hard to fill. Employability will improve when the syllabus reflects the demands of the industry.

A Japanese firm that set up an ancillary unit in Karnataka approached Lakshmikanth for help with hiring Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine operators. “We can’t find five good candidates against the company’s requirement of 200. The skills required for the job are not taught in the five or six colleges,” he said. The employability issue will worsen as the years go by, as many jobs will be lost to robots, he added.

The incident reflects a misalignment between industry requirements and available resources, which is a major concern for recruiters across sectors. There seems to be an inherent disconnect between the curriculum based learning at the institution level, with the requisite ‘job ready’ skills needed by Indian corporates.

Since independence, the technical education system in our country has grown into a fairly 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 located throughout the country.

The main objective of the technical education is that, it makes the students skilled and technically fit for the industries. In other words, people with sound technical knowledge cannot remain unemployed.

A few observations seem pertinent

First, there has been increasing concern about the employment gap and skills gap. Second, more than half of India’s population of 1.3 billion is below the age of 25 and finally, the annual demand for new jobs in India is estimated at 12-15 million.