Giving Compass' Take:

• Pranav Kumar Choudhary highlights policy solutions to address India's need to upskill the youth workforce. 

• How can funders help to upskill workers? How can partnerships facilitate this process? 

• Read about upskilling immigrants. 

With 30,000 youth joining the workforce every day, ensuring that they can participate meaningfully in the economy is a challenge. Instead of offering few supplementary courses, we need systemic solutions that upskill India’s young workforce at scale and prepare them for the future.

Timely recommendations are necessary before we lose out on this once in a lifetime demographic advantage that is predicted to end by 2055. This calls for the largest possible collaboration and massive efforts by all stakeholders.

Recommendation #1: Improve Qualification Packs

The National Occupational Standards (NOS) specify the standard of performance an individual must achieve when carrying out a function in the workplace, laid down by employers. A Qualification Pack (QP) is a set of NOS aligned to a job role. The report observed that QPs developed are narrowly defined and recommended the need of multidisciplinary teams of industry domain experts, academicians, pedagogists, trainers and training professionals to co-develop QPs to make it market relevant.

The report further recommends for these QPs to be standardized across the International Standard Classification of Occupations. This encourages Indian youth to not only be ready for national jobs but also for international requirements.

Recommendation #2: Employers at the core

The report suggests unless the 10-20% of the top employers are part of the Sector Skill Councils skilling programs will not be effective in India.

India’s skilling story is supply-led. The absence of demand-led models is mainly because program designers are not listening to employers when developing skilling programs. This results in youth getting trained in skills which are not aligned to the market requirements. Sometimes, youths are trained in one place but employers are geographically located at another area, which makes the placement process more challenging due to migration complexities. Hence to make any skilling program demand-led, it is important to first listen to those employers who are creating jobs. Thoughtfulness is also necessary when selecting the target group for those jobs. These factors can actually be catalytic in transforming the lives of our beneficiaries training in these programs.

Recommendations #3: the key to ensuring quality delivery is the trainers

With only 8,268 practicing trainers per annum and an estimated requirement of 20,000 qualified trainers per annum, the Sharda Prasad Committee Report has highlighted this shortage. The report, therefore, recommends a framework to train trainers across the board – from subjects to pedagogy skills to full center capacity utilization, and more.

To ensure the quality of our training delivery at DRF, we have introduced a competency test and a comprehensive 33-day Training of Trainers Program to build their competencies further. After completion, trainers are certified by the Learning & Development team, and their performance is continuously assessed through assessments and the students’ learning outcomes whom they are training.

Read the full article about upskilling India’s youth by Pranav Kumar Choudhary at AVPN.