siliconindia | | October 20179Skilling 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 coursescandidates for a longer duration of time they are productive on the job. This is a myth. Training should be connected to skilling. The idea is to get people onto the first job as early as possible. That should be the in-tention of skilling, but to get the first job, they need only a minimal amount of training and not the maxi-mum amount of training. That should be the intention of skilling. What is the minimum amount of training nec-essary to get them onto the first job? Today, the training programs are de-signed to maximize skilling. Hence, the second insight is ­ minimal train-ing is required. Thirdly, the longer the duration of training, the lesser the absorp-tion. The entire government skilling program is being pushed towards longer duration without understand-ing that the students cannot absorb. Especially the school dropouts and college low performers are unable to grasp the classroom model of train-ing. Even the short duration programs must be activity based training and discovery based learning rather than theoretical learning. Hence, the third insight - The longer the duration of training, lesser is the learning. Lower learning leads to higher dropouts. Fourthly, many of the skill pro-grams that end with certification are not successful because, at the end, they are unable to demonstrate the skills and get a job! The end pur-pose of skilling must be first job. Therefore, the job must be the center of skilling. The skill program must make the candidates attractive to the employers. Hence, the fourth insight, people are not looking for skill cer-tificates, they want jobs. Fifthly, the focus of a skill pro-gram should be on productivity. What should we train them on so that they become productive on day-1. That is what employers want; they do not want demonstration of skills. Dem-onstration of productivity is more important - there is gap between skill and productivity. Skill is input side productivity is output side. For ex-ample, the question is, what are the skills you need to do this job, design a training program around that. This is the skill based training program. The productivity based training programs question, what are the skills required in this job, which have the highest impact on productivity and design a training program only around them. This is a productivity based train-ing program. In this design, there are no surprises on the job and this is what we do job-instruction-method. Hence, fifth insight, if you design the program around output, the entire skill program will look very different.Now the question arises - the above prescribed model talks about getting a job, but what about growing in a job? Once the candidate gets a job, learns on the job, and performs the job well, to grow into the next role, he needs to undergo an `upskill-ing' program. Now, the government is putting a lot of focus on upskill-ing. So instead of putting the entire budget for training for a job, we must put part of the money on training for a job and the other half on upskilling to the next role. Muralidharan
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