India Skills Report 2019 has placed the southern state of Andhra Pradesh on top of the list of states with the highest employability. India’s Western desert state Rajasthan is at number two followed by its northern neighbour Haryana. The report also credits Andhra Pradesh for offering equal opportunities to both males and females, thus doing well on the parameter of gender equality.
Speaking to Financial Express Online about the rankings, Neeti Sharma, Senior Vice President, TeamLease Services said, “It is heartening to see Andhra Pradesh at the top of the leaderboard. It brings in a lot of confidence in the programs that are being undertaken in order to create a robust skill pool in India.”
Shantanu Rooj, Founder and CEO, Schoolguru Eduserve Pvt. Ltd., congratulated the state government and hailed their “strong and persistent focus in improving the employability of the Higher Education Students of the state at all levels and that has produced results”. Adding that it is a nice nice precedent for other states to follow, Rooj said, “Education must be linked to purpose and an outcome; a deficiency of either is not sustainable.”
TeamLease’s Neeti Sharma, when asked about what other states need to do to strive for higher employability, said, “They need to have structured programme right at the grass root levels. Skill education and training needs to start right from schools and continue across the spectrum of the academic chain up till candidates reach the employment stage.”
Indeed India’s Managing Director Sashi Kumar seconded Sharma’s views on saying that the real issue we face today is not of talent crunch or shortage, but of talent mismatch or “skills gap”. “In particular, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) sector is plagued by the lack of adequately skilled resources, with the average level of talent shortage having nearly doubled to 12% since 2014,” Kumar added.
Sharma suggested having an integrated framework which would link employability, learning, skill training and will provide credits, upward mobility, diploma and degree connectivity to enable learners and employers in gauging the skill gap that India faces.
India Skills Report 2019 is based on a joint-survey conducted by Wheebox, PeopleStrong, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and supported and backed by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Association of Indian Universities (AIU).