Skill education or vocational training is typically the cornerstone of any economy. Ironically, although India is considered to be a melting pot of knowledge and skills, the vast majority of its educated youth lack what can be termed as the ‘employability quotient’. Experts even characterise the country’s employability problem as a bigger challenge than unemployment itself. Equally problematic has been the quality of India’s vocational education content and delivery systems.
Now that the digital era has flourished more than ever, how can the skill education sector leverage this new medium and prepare the country for a new-age economy? Here’s a rundown of my thoughts:
Digitisation allows unprecedented systematisation of instructions, knowledge and training material and their storage. This has ensured a great degree of standardisation and benchmarking in terms of quality. The skill education sector can leverage this by preparing and using this high-quality standardised material (such as video lectures) for dissemination. If the content is customised, based on the needs and budget of the learner, it would help him to learn at his own pace.
Flowing from the first, there needs to be greater transparency within the skill education and training ecosystem. Digitisation also makes it easier for governments and industry authorities to recognise and give accreditation and certification to training programmes and material. The skill-providing industry/institution must use this opportunity to make the best of what is available in the market accessible to its learning community. For instance, a start-up can avail instruction/training material from global leaders to train or upskill its staff online. This would catalyse an organic market-based instruction/ training material ecosystem in a B2B as well as B2C mode.
Skill education providers must harness the unprecedented scale that digitisation allows in terms of accessibility for the learners. With COVID pressing the panic button, there is not only a spike in ed-tech companies, but some traditional technology giants are also offering free-to-use video conferencing and group interaction apps for collaborative learning. These apps and platforms can facilitate live instructions from a single point of delivery to an extraordinary number of learners previously inconceivable. This way they can learn irrespective of geographies and time zones making it even more helpful. This reduces both infrastructure and travel costs as well.
Some skill education providers have made it easier than ever to provide training support with the flexibility to choose both classroom and online training. However, they must also explore collaboration with those ed-tech companies and applications which take into account the low internet bandwidth and erratic connections which pose a major challenge in our country. They must provide ample solutions to cope with these real-world challenges, especially in rural areas.
Digitisation has also brought new-age careers and professions spawned by new technologies in its wake. With a ripple effect created in the Indian labour market, there has been a demand for professionals in the field of Banking, Finance, AI, machine learning, data science and mobile development, among others. This is both a challenge and an opportunity. According to an employability assessment firm, only 3% of engineers in India have newage technological skills. Worse, over 80% of graduate engineers passing out of universities in India are unemployable. With digitisation going mainstream, this skill deficit can be redressed through world-class training material.
With the Indian online education market set to reach Rs 360.3 billion by 2024, the skill education sector must be ready to cope with the change itself. Digitisation has made the earlier on-the-job training in a simulated environment even more intuitive and ‘real workplace-ready’. The skill provider can combine this apprenticeship model of learning either with online, onsite, or on-campus learning, or in any desired mix.
The writer is CEO at ICA Edu Skills.
