BW Communities

Training For A Business Opportunity

BW Online Bureau Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[The economy may be slowing, but business opportunities are not. There is a hot new sector where entrepreneurial energy is being unleashed. While much has been said about the new dotcom boom, a rather prosaic sector holds a $20 billion opportunity that entrepreneurs are beginning to exploit.   The business of converting raw human capital into industry ready manpower is seeing a combination of large corporations and start-ups rushing to set up units. About 500 million people will need professional skills in the next 10 years. And about 2 million trainers will be needed to train the new work force. After many false starts, the government and industry has been able to create financially sustainable model for skill creation activity. The model is simple. Entrepreneurs, corporations and NGOs create a project that feeds into a specific industry. They seek funding from the National Skill Development Corporation(NSDC). The NSDC connects them with the companies within the industry to ensure that the workers find placement after the course. NSDC has already committed about $230 million to many projects.  "With a sustainable model in place, skilling has emerged as a bigger opportunity than ever for existing and new entrepreneurs," says Dilip Chenoy, CEO and MD of NSDC. The surprise is that it took such a long time for this model to mature. The government had been running vocational training institutes. But these were outdated, badly administered and had no linkage with the companies that would finally hire them. The effort to connect skilling institutes with industries has made the real difference. Despite the rush of activity, the pace of growth of the skilling business is slower than it expected. A couple of unexpected challenges remain. Many companies continue to rely on their in-house training programme. These companies prefer to impart skills that are relevant to their own specific needs, rather than the need of the sector. The problem with this attitude is that the rate of attrition remains high. Most of these workers feel they need to change jobs to learn more. While CEOs welcome trained workers from external institutes, the HR departments often want to maintain their relevance by insisting on in-house skilling. As a result the overall level of skill in the sector does not improve. The skilling effort remains isolated and industry standards remain uneven.    The second issue is the mindset of the students who are finishing school and seeking jobs. All of them want to get a bachelors degree hoping that it would improve their job prospects. But most such graduates remain unemployed or under-employed. The real challenge for industries and the government is to convince them about the advantages of vocational training. State government level effort at raising the social status of skilled workers will boost the presence of students in training institutes. An educational advertising campaign can help change this mindset. To put things in perspective, these challenges are more manageable than the ones in other sectors. The need is so huge that there is a killing to be made in skilling.   Pranjal Sharma is a senior business writer. He can be contacted at pranjalx@gmail.com