Enhancing Digital Skills – UPSC GS2

According to a new report, about 27.3 million workers, representing 7% of the country’s workforce, will require digital skills training for their jobs over the next year.

The need for more advanced cloud computing skills, including machine learning and cloud architecture design have emerged as the fifth and sixth most in demand digital skills by employers in India by 2025.

Insufficient Capacity: Current infrastructure facilities available in the educational institutions throughout the country are inadequate considering the huge demand for skilled labour as there are not many trained and highly skilled trainers available.

Mobilisation: The outlook of people associated with skill development is still very traditional and the enrolment of the students for vocational education and training has become an extremely challenging task.

Scalability: Any model to be successful needs a lot of support from different stakeholders. Since there is limited buy-in from the corporate sector, the progress of such initiatives is slow.

Skills Mismatch: There is lack of industry-faculty interaction because of which the skill sets provided by the educational and training institutes do not end up suiting the employers’ requirements. As a result, though the people may be skilled but they do not get employment.

Barrier to Digital Skilling: According to the report named ‘Building Digital Skills for the Changing workforce’, lack of time to pursue training was the most commonly faced barrier to digital skilling.

There is an urgent need for the governments to work together with employers, training providers, and workers to meet these diverse and growing digital learning needs

To thrive in a digital future, new formats of skilling programmes on emerging technologies must be built and delivered at a massive scale.

Since, India has a huge ‘demographic dividend’ which means that it has a very high scope of providing skilled manpower to the labour market, so the need of the hour is to put coordinated effort from all stakeholders.

To strengthen the skill ecosystem, the need is to break down traditional barriers and be open to learning while earning, learning with flexible delivery and aligning it with qualification modularity.