Skill development through Edtech platforms

Skill development is the need of the hour

Employability of Indian students has always remained questionable and dastardly low over the years. 8 out of 10 engineers produced by India are considered unfit for the industry as per a report by SHL (erstwhile Aspiring Minds). The report also mentions that the overall employability for Indian engineers has not improved over the last decade.

It is appalling that less than 4% of the Indian engineers are employable in start-ups specialising in software development etc. India now produces more than 15 lakh engineers annually as compared to USA which produces lesser than 1.5 lakh engineers however the productivity is very different.

The India-US difference

Engineering graduates from the American Universities are competent enough to contribute from day one in their jobs where as the Indian counterparts undergo trainings for period varying between 6-12 months to become productive at their work place. A country with the highest number of Engineering and technical institutions fails to produce graduates that fit the industry requirement. What an irony! This would prove to be true not just for Engineering graduates but most degree qualifications in India.

Flexibility in skill development has gone up

On one hand the Government of India has not only acknowledged the problem, but has also come up with ways to resolve the same. The overhaul of the education policy under NEP has set ball rolling in the right direction. NEP truly has the objective of democratising and modularising the present education system.

Greater flexibility, easier inter college transfers, multiple exit opportunities for students pursuing higher education and most importantly a pronounced focus on life skills and vocational education is going to bridge the learning gap in Indian students via the official machinery.

On the other and a more important side we have the barrage of ed-tech companies which are enabling the current graduates in skilling, reskilling and upskilling themselves.

Some of the most popular upskilling courses today are

a) Digital Marketing

b) Data Structures and Algorithms

c) Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

d) Data Sciences

e) Block Chain

When to start upskilling?

One should ideally start as young as possible, rather than taking the upskilling road, after getting stuck at a low paying job, one should use the college years well and try and build an expertise of sorts. The flexible time slots or self-paced programs available at most of the ed-techs make it easy for a student to avail these courses. These courses are specially a boon for students from the tier II and tier III cities where it’s difficult to get access to quality instructors or the college infrastructure is lacking in terms of the exposure provided.