Turn And Face The Change: Equipping India’s Workforce For A Brave New World

• “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

These words were written by Jack Welch, the former CEO and Chairman of General Electric, for the company’s annual report in 2000. Change is the only constant and Welch’s words could apply to any era of human endeavour. But they ring louder and all the truer in the context of the change taking place in the world today.

The birth of the automobile, the invention of the steam engine, the industrial revolution all changed the way we lived our lives and did business. But never has the world evolved at such a rapid and frenetic pace as it is today.

Today we live in a world in which the largest ride-hailing service doesn’t own a car, the most popular accommodation provider doesn’t own any hotels, or the largest retailer doesn’t have any brick and mortar shops.

The birth of the internet — and especially the ecosystem that has exploded into life around it – has upended traditional business models.

Just as business models are being upended, so too are jobs. What Welch wrote in GE’s annual report holds equally true for both companies and individuals.

Just as companies have to adapt to meet the challenges of change, so too does the individual have to be equipped to live and work in a world that could be drastically different to the one today.

And in doing that both challenge and opportunity lie – especially for a country like India.

India has been blessed with a ‘demographic dividend’, a large young working-age population that can power the country’s transformation from a developing economy to a developed one.

Approximately half of India’s 1.2 billion people are under the age of 26. The country is set to become the youngest in the world by 2020 and is projected to be home to 20 percent of the global working age population by 2025.

Such a ‘demographic dividend’ comes along only once in several generations, making it crucial India harnesses its potential. But, the country risks squandering this opportunity unless it equips its workforce to seize it before the population loses its vigour and ages.

Its biggest hurdle? The aforementioned ‘skills gap’.

Over 6,000 colleges across India churn out 1.5 million engineers into the job market each year. But barely seven percent of them are equipped to handle basic engineering tasks.

The above is just an example of the ‘skills gap’ prevalent throughout our economy, with a slew of reports in recent years highlighting similar discrepancies across different sectors.

To put it simply, the school and college system is spitting out batch after batch of youngsters who are well-educated, but just not equipped with the skills employers are looking for.

“Of all the students entering the job market across the country, hardly 2/5 meet the criteria of employment set by the employers,” found the India Skills Report 2017, put together by talent assessment firm Wheebox and supported by the Confederation of Indian Industry and the United Nations Development Programme, among others.

“The severity of the situation is accentuated by many levels when the economy is looking up, new jobs are getting generated in e-commerce, energy, retail, telecom, hospitality and financial industry; but there are not enough skilled people available,” the report said.

Educated, but unemployable.

The increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and robotics is only set to exacerbate the problem. In its ‘Future of Jobs’ report published in 2016, the World Economic Forum predicted technology will make five million jobs redundant worldwide by 2020.

“… Some jobs will be wiped out, others will be in high demand, but all in all, around five million jobs will be lost,” the WEF noted.

With technology taking over the more basic jobs, employers will increasingly be looking to hire workers with more advanced skill-sets, an abundance of creativity, an agility of mind and soft-skills.

In fact, 60 percent of the employers surveyed for the India Skills Report prioritised domain expertise, communication skills, integrity and values, and learning agility as the top four skills they were looking for in prospective hires.

The need to bridge this ‘skills gap’ has not been lost on policymakers and corporates. Several leading business houses run training institutes to not only ‘upskill’ their existing workforce but also create a pool of potential employees. The Indian Government, too, is implementing its well-known ‘Skill India’ mission – which aims to train 40 crore people in India in different skills by 2022 – on a war footing.

But skilling needs to go beyond the vocational aspect. Initiatives aimed at skilling India’s workforce need to give beneficiaries something to aspire to, establish a roadmap so to say highlighting how they skills they’re acquiring today can serve as stepping stones to a better way of life, guaranteeing a higher income, social status and dignity of labour.

As a matter of fact, income inequality is among the biggest factors standing in the way of efforts to bridge the skills gap. If a blue collar worker’s lot in life isn’t really going to improve after he ‘upskills’, why would he want to acquire a new skill at all?

India has traditionally tended to play catch-up to western countries that industrialised before we did. But the disruption taking place in the world today has the potential to level the playing field if not wipe the slate clean.

The opportunity is there for the taking. India has the advantage of the population dividend. But it’s only an advantage provided we equip our working age population with the required skills. At the end of the day, countries with the most future-ready workforce are the ones that will prosper in this brave new world.

Seema Tiwari heads CSR at Godrej & Boyce. In her current role, she has led the implementation of the 10 year CSR and Sustainability strategy called the Good & Green and ensuring its alignment with Godrej Group goals, nation’s priorities and the business strategies. She has devised governance for CSR programs encompassing due diligence, partner selection, putting systems to monitor ongoing programs, 360 degree evaluation, audit and impact assessment.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

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Regards,
The CSR Journal Team

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