Employment Vs Employability’ Seminar – 27th August 2016
SkillTree Solutions organized an industry seminar ‘Employment Vs Employability’ on 27th August 2016. It was attended by approximately 200 youths from various streams from in an around Udaipur. As per a report from Business World (2015) of the 50 Lakh students graduating every year only 25% are employable. Organized with the aim to sensitize youth of the skill gap – in terms of technical, functional and especially soft skills - that the industry faces today, the seminar touched upon such key issues.
The seminar had eminent speakers from the industry such as Bhagwat Babel (Joint Managing Director, Secure Meters; President – IEEMA), Tathagat Varma (Former Director Ops, Yahoo; Founder – Thought Leadership) and Bawa Grover (Former COO TCS, eServe; Head – Indian Customer Satisfaction Index). Top IT/ITES companies from Udaipur such as Arcgate, Fusion and Five Splash Infotech were also represented at the seminar.
Mr. Bhagwat Babel emphasized that it is important for students to be accountable for their own personal growth and add skill sets that make them more employable. He highlighted that every journey – be it professional or personal – has 2 factors playing their roles; external as well as internal. It is a balance of these two that result in us reaching out destination. We, as individuals, tend to overplay the impact of external factors, whereas it is more often than not, that the internal factors, such as motivation, problem solving attitude, inclination to learn, that fail us.
Mr. Tathagat Varma highlighted the grim reality of ‘employability’ where 80% of graduates in India are unemployable with less than 3 % actually going through formal skill development training. He also dwelled upon the reasons that contribute to this and emphasized that it is a basic change in our attitudes that could make us more employable or successful. One needs to take more risks to be able to learn more. He provided a perspective stating that ‘Failure’ itself is not a catastrophe, but failure to learn from failure definitely is. He also added that we must look at each such instance as a learning opportunity to increase our skill set.
Mr. Bawa Grover helped students to explore opportunities in the IT/ITES industry, showcasing it as a great prospective employer not only in terms of numbers but also for rewarding career opportunities. There is a significant shift in the industry with employment opportunities increasing only for high skilled jobs and not so much for the low skilled ones. He spoke about the 4th industrial revolution which is driven by ‘VUCA’ – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – which drives the changing market place.
As possible solution for these griming issues, SkillTree Solutions has joined hands with Kapil Sharma (Founder/Director – Five Splash Infotech) to set up a training academy to work towards up-skilling youth in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities enabling them to match up to industry standards, which will conduct various workshops and training programmes starting mid September. As per India Skills Report 2015, with 65% of human resource pool under the age of 35, India sits on an opportune moment in history, with about 12 million individuals expected to join the workforce every year. It is, however, important that this workforce is a skilled one to ensure that the gap between employment and employability is bridged.
The training academy will have programs which are industry focused, starting with one for IT/ITES. There would also be other programs for English language development and various soft skills including personality development and communication skills, amongst others. All these programs are being designed with inputs from the industry to ensure that these are relevant to the corporate world. Also, there would be experts from the industry coming in to deliver the technical content, to enable a quicker learning curve for the trainees once they are placed within organizations; for which SkillTree Solutions would be providing assistance.
As part of the giving back to society, the academy will be sponsoring the training fee of 15% of the enrolments, decided basis academy’s core team’s discretion. Five Splash has offered to absorb the first batch of this academy into its BPO division as a boost to support this initiative. SkillTree Solutions believes that other organizations would also see value in this initiative and extend support.