siliconindia | | October 20178SKILL EDUCATION FOR SKILL INDIABy Muralidharan, Chairperson, TMI GroupHeadquartered in New Castle, TMI Group a multi-national organization specialized in manufacturing & marketing physical property testing instruments for the packaging, paper, pulp, plastic film, foil, ink, textile, adhesives, and corrugated industries.In the last few years, skill educa-tion has come to the forefront. This article talks about a few key insights from our experience in the skilling space. Basically, the first part is to understand the demograph-ics - how many people are dropping out of schools, how many people are pass-ing out of colleges - Out of the 12 mil-lion people who are coming into skilling space, more than half of them are gradu-ates, 5.9 million. Currently, there is more need to skill graduates than anyone else. The entire current skilling program is focused at school dropouts. The gov-ernment does not focus in the graduate space, because graduate education, espe-cially engineering is privatized, charging high fee structures. Hence, the govern-ment believes the college is responsible for their employability and employment as well. This understanding is wrong be-cause the largest segment of graduates passing out is B.A., B.Sc and B.Com which are around five million and not engineers. These non-engineering grads are mostly from low rung government colleges or very poor trusts which are as good as government college. The logic that the college must pro-vide training since fee structures are high is valid only for engineering and MBAs, not for B.A., B.Sc. or B.Com. Skilling programs are a top-up over and above the graduation courses that candidates do ­ students should not opt out of regular graduation and opt for skilling courses. For example, B.Com is a general pro-gram but if you want to become a GST expert, you have to undergo a GST skill-ing program. So, depending on what role you want to do, you need to get skilled. Hence, the first key insight is ­ the gov-ernment skilling focus needs to shift to the Graduate space, NOW!Secondly, let's understand the pur-pose of skilling? There is a misunder-standing about skilling that if you skill IN MY OPINION
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