Over the last few decades, India has seen enormous growth in emigration of its citizens to other countries. Economic growth coupled with low mobility of the remaining labor force has exacerbated a growing shortage of qualified skilled professionals to perform needed local work. Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to find ‘industry ready’ qualified professionals.
India's higher education system is choking, unable to keep up with the numbers of aspirants. The quality of teaching has tremendous scope for improvement. Meanwhile, the government sets unnecessarily high eligibility criteria for jobs that does not mean to have very high skills, hierarchies are rigid. The shortage of Indian knowledge professionals arise from low employability and competing demand from the domestic market as the economy grows.
The need for professional training institutes to bridge the ‘skill gap’ in the industry first stemmed from Dr. C.K. Prahlad’s prediction in 2007 that double-digit growth in India will see light only if the country is able to make available 200 million graduates and 500 million skilled people by 2022. This has created a definite necessity to upgrade vocational education to cater to India’s demand for higher economic growth, demographic changes and the obvious demand-supply mismatch in available skills in many sectors.
The Sea of Opportunities [/b]
With the growth in the Aviation Industry over the past 10 years, students are becoming aware of the different opportunities in the Industry besides the popular Cabin Crew & Pilot programs. Areas of Ground Staff Operations and Cargo are gaining popularity and the staff requirement in these areas is far more than the Pilots or Cabin Crew. There is a constant demand in these areas. With the privatization of airports and their expansion plans, there has been a huge demand in skilled resource for various departments of airport operations.
Given the development of the hotel industry in the last few years the employment opportunities have multiplied. Promotional initiatives by the government to promote India as a major tourist destination on a global platform have resulted in a surge of tourists from all over the world. Most of the companies in the hospitality industry are optimistic about the growth in the sector and shows high expectations for the coming years. As a result the growth of employment opportunities in the sector is going to increase in the coming months.
The retail industry in India is a sunrise sector and is estimated to double in value from US$ 330 billion in 2007 to $640 billion by 2015. In fact, India has topped AT Kearney's Annual Global Retail Development Index (GRDI) for the third year in a row as the most attractive market for retail investment. Proposed Foreign Direct Investment in the fast-growing retail sector will extensively boost hiring activities and has the potential to create about 80 lakh jobs in the country.
Challenges faced by the service industry[/b]
Professionals point out the fact that more emphasis is given on the educational excellence of a student, has lead to the mismatch between academic curricula offered by a majority of professional colleges and the inherent industry requirements.
On one hand, there is a shortage of manpower and on another hand there is unemployment. This clearly shows there is a major divergence between the aspirations of the job seeker and the employer. The problem is more acute in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities where a number of students pass out with academic degrees, but find it difficult to get placed in the industry. The challenge is to train them to meet industry requirements. There is a need to tap the aptitude of the student and their skills sets. Most of the Tier II B-schools are struggling on the placements front and manage to achieve placements for only 20-40 per cent of their students. (As indicated by Little Extra, a Kolkata based research firm)
Also, effective counseling and advice can help a student to find the right kind of opportunity while identifying growth areas, at the individual level, for better employability and job prospects.
Bridging the need-gap [/b]
Over the last couple of years, the non-formal professional training industry has seen the entry of a variety of training institutes in the education space. These Institutes cater to specific organizational skill gap and in turn contribute in reducing the larger skill gap experienced in their respective industries by turning their scalable capabilities into successful business units through the captive model.
While the vocational market in the last 2 years has seen tremendous activity with increasing momentum from the government, this space has seen an invasion of private players as well as the government’s Private Public Partnership (PPP) model. The combined efforts of these models are working together to bridge the prevailing technical and soft-skills (together referred to as employable skills) gap.
In a country like India, especially in the service sector ‘soft skills’ training has become even more important since subjects like personality development are not made a part of the academic curricula. As globalization and competitiveness becomes the benchmark of any multinational organization, it is obviously important for employees to be equipped with effective soft skills.
There is a need to tap the aptitude of the student and these skills sets. To bridge this gap institutes like IESP focus on training students as per the need of the industry. Taking Aviation as an example, the way of presenting oneself along with the attitude and communication skills required are completely different from those students who would want to get into the retail Industry. At IESP, along with the contemporary course curriculum and methodology an incremental value addition in terms of industry perspective, guest faculty, on-field practical training amongst other initiatives aim at bridging the existing need-gaps in the industry and preparing a student for a long-term career growth with the industry.
Considering skilled-based training as the need of the hour, one of the important parts of the training program should include workshops and guest lectures conducted by industry experts to help students get the right exposure and understanding of the existing and new trends evolved in this industry. Workshops and guest lectures conducted by industry experts also give a realistic view as to what is possible in the industry and which career choice could be the best for a student.
A thorough understanding of the Industry requirements needs to be inculcated into the programmes along with practical industry exposures to give students a hands-on job experience before they take up opportunities in the industry. Effective training on behavioral aspects has become an imperative part of the training programmes.