Skills Training Should Be Economically Driven

Last decade has seen a number of sector skills councils come into being. One of these is Automotive Skills Development Council, accredited under the National Council for Vocational Education and training (NCVET) and comprising several industry professionals. Over the years it has trained lakhs of candidates in industry-specific skills. In an interview to BW Education, ASDC CEO Arindam Lahiri describes the progress made in skilling and shortfalls that still remain. Excerpts:

How has the skill landscape evolved and what are the positive outcomes and lacunae over 10 years?

I would trace the journey since the formation of NSDC and subsequently, Skill India. Initially, the ideas were around financing models for technical and vocational education - how to set up training centres in either private or public-private partnerships and how do you operationally fund the training expenses. A lot of students were left behind as they could not afford to pay commercial fees to pursue a programme. That’s where Pradhan Mantri Kishore Loan Yojana came in, to help students. 

Several other key challenges have been identified down the road, especially right counselling of candidates, students who want to enrol in one course but get enrolled in another programme. They eventually do not convert into economic output, whereas skill training in the country should be economically driven. 

Another challenge is the quality of trainers when every effort is about standardising the courses and aligning them to National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF). We often forget that the programme has to be delivered by trainers, so the quality of trainers is essential. 

And finally, I think there was earlier no significant involvement of industry. When I talk about my industry, where a large segment of the population is formally employed, the skill training in these training institutions and the skill training in the industry were happening as a parallel activities. And the two were not meeting. 

Whereas the government always thought that they were providing a lot of support because they've been putting a lot of money into this training system. 

Initially, it was largely the ITIs that provided manpower to the industry. What was the problem with that system?

My industry still hires largely from the ITI system. Because in the absence of any other skill training system, they feel that the ITI system is still better than nothing. And many of them have adopted ITIs and put their own manpower, providing inputs like training of faculty. 

The ITI system was very manufacturing focused, whereas over the years, the share of services in the GDP had increased. So obviously, the ITI system wasn't able to give that kind of an opportunity. And only a handful of them were aligned with industry. The rest were doing curriculum programmes, etc, which were not in sync with what the industry needed. And therefore, when the industry would hire people with ITI certificates, they would not give any value to that certificate, because he had to be trained all over again.

How do the sector-specific councils help industry and employment seekers?

Sector skill councils were modelled around some of the best practices in Germany, Australia, the UK, etc. Most of these were established between 2011 to 2015. Each one of them has been able to cover the journey very differently depending on whether you're working in an organised sector industry or an unorganised sector because, in an organised sector, you have a lot of support from the industry. But when you're talking about a lot of sectors which are very unorganised, then there will be a huge amount of challenge of engagement with the industry because the industry also doesn't have that kind of bandwidth to be able to engage with them. 

In the automotive sector, we work with pretty much almost all the vehicle manufacturers and original equipment manufacturers which are large organisations and have dedicated skilled training divisions. 

But as you move deeper into the value chain and you go to the smaller organisations, that is where the need for skilled manpower is the greatest and they themselves cannot do it. So, we will have to entail the support of the big players and engage them so that smaller players can benefit from the training that is provided by the former. 

What have been some of the major initiatives by your council?

We've been working significantly closely with most of the most of the vehicle manufacturers like Hero, Toyota and Bajaj. So, what we do is align their programmes with the standards that we have created. And we use their facilities to ensure that they deliver programmes accordingly. 

We are also utilising some of the CSR funds available under skilling initiatives to impact some of those people who are in the informal sector. One such component of informal sector are the roadside mechanics or the independent garage mechanics, essentially, because they are not attached to any brand or whatever. The second component is that of drivers – be it cab driver or an ambulance driver or commercial vehicle driver. We ensure funding opportunities either from the government or from the industry through CSR that we could use to upskill them or skill fresh manpower. We've done some fairly significant work, but a lot more work remains to be done.

Would you say that the issue of curriculum has been addressed now with the changes that have come up?

I would say that curriculum is in an ever-evolving phase as rapid disruptions are happening, and you have to constantly look at changing. But if the question is, are they reasonably aligned to the current technologies? Yes, we have designed programmes for electric vehicles, we have upgraded all our programmes for industry 4.0 applications in factories and in dealerships. As far as trainers is concerned, we have made a beginning and done some programme in various auto clusters in partnership with Germany through GIZ, wherein German trainers are also available for training. 

How many persons have you trained in the last five years or two years?

During Covid, the number of training was significantly low. The training centres were actually physically closed. Many of our programmes are quite difficult to deliver on a digital platform and you need to do hands-on work. But if I talk about the overall last five years, we would have trained close approximately 3.5 -4 lakh in different programmes and in the last one year, about one lakh. 

Can you describe which states have you focused on?

If you look at our manufacturing-related jobs, we have around 12 clusters across the country in automotive manufacturing, so these are the places that are largely the home of most of our training locations. 

We do have training programmes outside of that area too, but that is more in the area of dealerships and drivers, and now every state has a training centre. The advantage of this is the candidates don't need to migrate because they can be formally engaged in the local geography. We have recently tied up with Toyota to set up about 15 to 20 centres, where they will support the centre in terms of advanced infrastructure. And the objective is to meet the requirement of their dealerships in the rural markets and have those training centres as close to those markets as possible. 

And if a student wants to join your programme, how does he approach your institute and how does he get the funding for the course?

We have a microsite called careerguide.asdc.org.in which lists the various career options in the automotive industry and what are the courses available for that and we also give them the list of the potential training centre that he or she may want to look at, in a particular state at a particular district level. 

We also created a pool of e-learning modules which is supported by our industry, so that the student can make up his mind. So, we have programmes in partnership with Toyota, Eicher etc, which are available free of cost on our website. And one can just go through the small modules to get an understanding of the work that is done in the industry, the technology being used and the learning they need to do which is there to aim for a certain kind of a job in the industry.

Shruti Tripathi

BW Reporters Shruti Tripathi

Meha Mathur

BW Reporters The author works as Senior Associate Editor with BW Businessworld