By Abhimanyu Saxena,
Dolly Vaishnav did not have it easy. She is a typical small-town girl trying to make it big in India’s $200 billion-plus IT sector. She started her adult life with a string of bad luck and missed opportunities that kept her from securing a high paying job in one of India’s top tech companies. Her situation was further exasperated by the Covid-19 pandemic that stopped her from going abroad for higher education. She had to settle for a degree from a lesser-known engineering college in her hometown in Chhattisgarh and landed in a small IT company in Hyderabad. Refusing to be bogged down by the challenges, Dolly decided to upgrade her skills by taking a 9-month course offered by an edtech company. Today she works in one of India’s leading unicorns in Bangalore, and the pay is better than she had ever hoped for.
Considering the size of India’s working population and the growing impatience of our youth who seek a better life than what their parents were used to, Dolly’s success story is rare. A vast majority of India’s youth are wedded to jobs and vocations that may not be very promising in terms of building a solid career. On the other hand, the tech sector, which attracts a large percentage of our youth, also struggles to keep up with changing dynamics. There are enough credible reports that have highlighted the massive skill gap in this tech sector. Hiring managers are unable to fill up high-end coding jobs, particularly in software development, machine learning, data science, analytics, industrial automation & artificial intelligence fast enough.
This has been largely a supply-side issue. Traditional universities and engineering colleges that have been the single largest source of a talent pool for the last nearly four decades are falling behind. Recent studies have suggested that an overwhelming majority of young engineering graduates need mandatory training before they can be deployed. And that is a serious business challenge for tech companies that wield a tool that keeps changing. Businesses’ digitalisation and ‘cloudification’ have opened a whole new range of job opportunities—both within the tech sector and the traditional businesses that are stepping into an era of Industry 4.0 and beyond.
This supply-side issue can be solved only by a sustainable supply-side solution. Since it is not coming from traditional academia, the industry is coming up with its own solutions, generally being bucketed under ‘lifelong’ learning. Today we have scores of edtech start-ups founded by former employees of tech companies that offer the right upskilling and reskilling services to fill the ever-growing hiring gaps.
The more important message for our youth (and tech companies) is that engineering degrees alone will not guarantee an enviable career. The change here is twofold. One, the demand is shifting towards skills that are at the higher end of the spectrum, some of which were listed earlier. Two, unlike in the past, these skills require regular updating.
One of the reasons for stories like Dolly’s being rare is the lack of awareness of emerging opportunities. There is a mad rush toward paper degrees that is not helping them build a career. On the other hand, those who are reskilling and upskilling themselves see the reward. A recent survey by Scaler showed that professionals, on average, got a 126% hike in salaries after upskilling. A similar jump (~70%) was also seen in the salaries of people who changed jobs after upskilling, and a third of them got promoted.
We also need nationwide, well-coordinated, mission-driven advocacy to get the message across. We should be investing more of our time and money in building relevant skills instead of spending four years chasing a degree that is edging towards its sell-by date. The purpose of such an advocacy movement must be about changing our youth’s mindset and decision influencers, i.e., parents, peers, etc.
Tech companies and their leaders must step up their efforts too. They must keep repeating the demand side story by consistently highlighting the changing demand in the job market and the means to keep the skills updated.
The author co-founder, Scaler, InterviewBit. Expressed views are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of the FinancialExpress.com.
