The Hindu Business Line : Vocational skills matter

This is the time to revamp the vocational education system, which will ensure that jobs at the bottom of the value chain are manned by skilled manpower.

— K. Ananthan

Not enough hands: The shortage of people with basic skills such as masonry and driving could slow down the country’s economic progress.

Divakar Kaza

On a recent visit to Mumbai, I had lunch with the HR head of one of India’s largest hotel chains. He informed me that his group is setting up over 60 hotels/resorts in the next 24 months. Assuming an average headcount of 500 per property, this converts into 30,000 jobs. Given that it is a hotel chain, more than 25,000 of these 30,000 jobs will require modular employment skills — skills in preparing beds, skills in skilfully cutting vegetables and doing other jo bs in the kitchen, preparing bills, taking orders in restaurants and sending it to the kitchen and so on. All these require basic skills, not leadership and management or engineering skills or advanced educational qualifications.

My next stop was the office of the newly appointed head of HR operations for a home improvement retail chain which is in growth mode. Still adjusting to the new world of retail, she threw up her hands in despair and inquired: “Where will I get employees who know about furniture and paints… and can talk to customers intelligently and make a sale?” The retail chain, which is a symbol of the new consumerist India, is just one of the dozen large business houses that have ventured into the retail business and are desperate for people to employ.

There was also a chance encounter during a trip to Hyderabad with an infrastructure mogul who is benefiting from the government’s focus on infrastructure and the increasing need for roads, bridges, malls and office complexes. His company has grown substantially over the past few years and with a professional management team and an environment friendly to growth, it is likely that it will continue to grow. In passing, he mentioned that it is not the shortage of engineers that will retard his growth plans, but the shortage of masons, brick layers and welders.

On the same trip, I also met an old colleague who now heads an infrastructure firm that also manages resorts, convention centres and golf courses. He casually mentioned that for giving the finishing touches to his company’s high-end hotel and residential properties in Hyderabad, skilled workmen are recruited from Malaysia. From expat CEOs we have moved to expat workmen!

A blessing and a challenge

India’s leap into the 21st century service economy is both a blessing and a challenge. A blessing due to the enormous job opportunities that are being created in the lower half (and more at the bottom) of the employment value chain and a challenge as we do not seem to have enough people who are equipped to do the job.

This is creating an enormous strain on business houses, which are forced to teach employees the basics — like teaching a freshly minted commerce graduate (who comes at a salary of at least Rs 8,000 a month ) how to use a cash register, how to handle billing software in a retail shop and how to do physical stock verification; all skills he should have learnt in his undergraduate course.

It is a different story that the B.Com. course teaches him how to finalise a balance sheet, which is wisdom he is unlikely to use for the first 15 years of his working life. Or it could be training an industrial training institute (ITI) pass-out, with a diploma in electronics, how to repair a refrigerator, microwave, television or laser printer. The mismatch and irrelevance of skills vis-À-vis industry requirements is leading to significant under utilisation of the infrastructure of over 5,500 ITIs with over 7 lakh seats.

Every parent hopes that their child will go to an IIT or become a doctor/lawyer/IAS officer; we all know that this is not possible. Nature creates human beings with different levels of ability and the aptitude to learn and it is a fortuitous coincidence that industry and society also require employees/people with different levels of skill and competence. There seems to be a method to the madness in the way nature operates.

Therefore, we will continue to have students who drop out after class 10, some who only do vocational courses, some who do undergraduate courses and very few who embark on specialised professional courses. This is the reality that the Government has to recognise and then equip these youngsters with vocational and ready-to-deploy skills to get into mainstream India’s growth at levels where their ability takes them.

Service sector skills gap

The legacy of the British and the far sightedness of post-Independence politicians has created a reasonable education system which generates enough engineers, doctors, lawyers and administrators. However, we seem to have tripped badly and are unprepared for the surge of jobs that the new economies (more acute in the service sector) are creating which require employees with varying degrees of proficiency in easy-to-learn skills. Vocational education is one of the more neglected focus areas of the Government and seems to have slipped off the radar.

For instance, the Government’s attempts to train commercial apprentices generates a minuscule number to feed the growing hunger of the service economy. And the practical training and the related instruction (RI) classes for commercial apprentices does not equip them with the skills needed to walk into a retail outlet, hotel or BPO company and be productive at short notice.

Most large companies grudgingly maintain large parallel universities to equip their ‘qualified’ but ‘ill equipped’ workforce, teaching them job relevant skills. This situation calls for a radical revamp of our educational input system. While enough academics are focusing on education policy, we need a policy for dropouts from the formal education system, which focuses on vocational skills, and not just in metros, but at the district and taluk level.

Refocus ITI infrastructure

If a young Indian drops out after failing his class 10 exam, he is still employable if he has modular employment or vocational skills. Ideally he or she should be able to go to a Government aptitude assessment centre that tests his abilities and aptitudes and guides him to a 3-4 week course in an employment-oriented skill. He could be the efficient driver for a large taxi service or a high quality mason on any infrastructure project or a proficient warehousing associate with a large retailer. The same applies to students who drop out after class 12. All it needs is a refocus of the mammoth ITI infrastructure built with the tax payer’s money.

The government needs to work in close collaboration with industry and help revamp the entire ITI system (great design but faulty execution in terms of curriculum and practical training ) to enable pass outs to be not just readily employable but ‘productive’ soon. Till this happens and we train young people in vocational and employable skills, these institutes will only be churning out pass outs who need to go through another round of ‘real’ and ‘relevant’ training at the expense of corporate India (the cost of this training ultimately trickles down to the customer in its own insidious fashion).

As is always the trend, it is the canny entrepreneur who has already spotted this need and hence the plethora of courses in housekeeping, masonry, carpentry skills, data entry, retail store operations, airline bookings and so on. While credible data and feedback on the utility of these courses is not available, people who do them do get absorbed rather rapidly with employers who are happy with the relevance of their skills and knowledge.

In the first 50 years after Independence, we built the IITs and the engineering education infrastructure and it spawned a generation of technologists and business leaders who have done us proud. Now is the time to revamp the vocational education system which will ensure that jobs at the bottom of the value chain are manned by skilled manpower. Without such a revamp, the chances of the current growth faltering will be real and our economy could derail.

(The writer is a strategic HR consultant, executive coach, columnist and founder of Track3 HR Solutions.)

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