The Stake
Jurisdictions and boundaries are good and yet sometimes they are the opposite. I am using the word stake in the title of this series of articles in the same context. Stake as in something owned within a well-defined territory or boundary and that forms the crux of the discussion.
India is a diverse country. We have the world’s youngest population. We see an average of about thirty-six million people enroll to higher education courses. We have about eight hundred universities, about fifty thousand colleges which translates to roughly twenty-eight institutions available to teach every hundred thousand students.
To support these fifty thousand colleges there are thousands of private training institutions offering varied vocational training courses. A survey says that only 6% of our youth opt for professional training. It is a significant point and we will discuss it in detail in due course.
The National Skill Development Corporation in its 2019 annual report says under 50% of the graduates who came out of colleges were employable. The highest being MBA graduates. Engineering students came in at about 48% or so.
India created 7-10 million jobs every year since 2012 both in skilled and unskilled sectors. While it is a fact that more than 60% of our population joining the workforce every year engage themselves in Agriculture, less than 50% of the remaining are employable in the skilled sector. The term employable is a misnomer somewhat. It should not be construed that every employable person gets employed. There are other dynamics at play here.
The employability rate is clearly far below the mark it should be. A mere eight out of a hundred people interviewed get selected today and that is pushing it a bit. The interview ‘hit rate’ today is a mere 8%. One needs to show a healthy employability quotient to be called for an interview and assuming all the hundred people interviewed are employable, only 8% of them getting selected tells us a different story. We need to understand the employment creation, employability quotient and the final score of employed people to define the underlying problems clearly.
While there are a thousand universities and tens of thousands of institutions who are trying to make our youth employable, and there is the government and its initiatives like NSDC adding their resources behind creating employment and increasing employability and yet only 50% of our graduates are employable and the fact that only 8% of these employable graduates are getting selected in interviews what are the things that need to be changed and who should change them in order to increase the employability rate to more than 8%?
Who owns the stake of employability? Who are the stakeholders? Here is a list
The Government
The Academia
The Individual
I have always believed that generating employment opportunities is the government’s job while it is our personal responsibility to become more employable. Employability is a personal responsibility of every individual who wants to get employed.
Employability – the stake
What does employability constitute? Who is an “employable” person? What makes people employable? A person who gets employed is the most employable would be the straightest answer possible. But in my understanding, people who get employed are not merely skilled and educated. They go beyond the 'eligibility' criterion. They make sure they are 'available' and 'accessible'.
Which means, employability constitutes three key factors:
Eligibility
Accessibility
Availability
Whose stake is Eligibility? Whose stake is Accessibility? And whose stake is Availability? That is the burning question that needs to be answered.