How India is making professional talent employable

The need is to get ‘manufacturing ready’ talent from engineering colleges and management institutes to meet demands for high skill talent and make the make in India programme a grand success

Nigel Eastwood

The new financial year comes with great expectations about the rapid growth of India, all round development, new job creation for the teeming millions and more. This at a time when most of the world economies are seeing low to modest growth. Expectation for the growth are not just within the country but outside as well, as the world closely watches the unfolding of reforms in India and emergence of a new growth engine that will catapult the country to greater heights.

Make in India, Startup India and Digital India are among the initiatives that will help catalyse growth and create new jobs. There’s already much evidence of that change, which is expected to gain momentum in the new fiscal year.

After the September 2014 start of the Make in India programme which seeks to promote manufacturing and attract foreign investment, there has been a 40 per cent increase in FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) flow between October 2014 and June 2015 compared to the year ago period, according to the latest Economic Survey.

Under the programme, the government has awarded more than 50 defence manufacturing contracts to private entities in the last one year after allowing 49 per cent FDI in the defence.

Besides large global companies including GE, Lenovo, Foxconn (which makes the Apple iPhone), Siemens, HTC, Boeing and others are planning to set up manufacturing units in India.

Companies from France, Japan, Germany, China, South Korea have shown interest in investing in India besides large Indian industrial houses plan to scale their manufacturing plants. This will not only boost the economy, but lead to considerable job creation.

Take for instance just one sector — electronics consumption – smartphones, flat TVs, hard disks, routers and more. India will consume around $400 billion of such electronics by 2020 and without local manufacturing India will be importing 75 per cent of that. The ecosystem is gearing up to meet the increasing demand. But all this can’t happen without skills enhancement and development.

India has plenty of talent -- millions of youngsters are entering the working population every year. It’s a great demographic dividend, unmatched by any other country around the world. Despite that great advantage the employable population to take up new roles and jobs in the high tech industries being built are limited. This is one area in which efforts have to be accelerated to meet demands of the new age with manufacturing industries.

Less than 5 per cent of India’s workforce in India has undergone formal skill training compared to 68 per cent in the UK, 75 per cent in Germany, 52 per cent in the US, 80 per cent in Japan and 90 per cent in South Korea, as noted by the document on the framework of implementation of the National Mission for Skill Development.

India can do it as shown by the rise of the IT services industry. Around Y2K, a lot of people wondered whether India will be able to scale the game in global technology and business services.

Today, companies in India manage IT infrastructure for the largest of global corporations including most of the Fortune 500 companies. The industry led from the front foot to make it happen with robust training programmes by companies large and mid-size including TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant and Mindtree. Apart from in-house training programmes that created a strong pool of industry-ready talent, the companies forged alliances with academic institutions to get the right skilled youth. The fact that the around $150 billion IT-BPO sector supports global companies is evidence enough that Indian talent is second to none.

Even in manufacturing the span and scope is large — from high-tech manufacturing to making products of tomorrow like sensors for Internet of Things, wearable devices and more.

According to Cisco by 2020 there will be a market for 50 billion connected devices. Manufacturers in India can look at this opportunity as well besides other high tech areas, provided there are right skills available to undertake the task.

Millions of new graduates need jobs and manufacturing will create those jobs. To make it a win-win for the industry and job seekers, the talent should be readily employable. The country needs to focus on skill enhancement and improving productivity of its workforce. The need is to get `manufacturing ready’ talent from engineering colleges and management institutes to meet demands for high skill talent and make the make in India programme a grand success.