Our Bureau The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) is working with various companies and firms to explore if it can create a Google Maps kind of skill map, where a person can switch from one profession to another based on common competencies between the two, a senior bureaucrat said on Wednesday.

“You might be skilled in logistics and you have competencies within you but halfway through you want to turn towards retail from logistics. Are there some competencies that are common between the two that you can pick few and add few more skills and get into retail?” Manish Kumar, MD, NSDC, said. “These are some of the things that we are trying to do and we are using AI for all that.”

He was speaking at a virtual panel discussion, ‘Industry Re-imagined’, as part of CII Connect 2020.

However, he added that India is massive, so it is not possible to do all of that as fast as one wants to but the overall environment is quite optimistic.

Kumar also said that NSDC is currently focussing on short-term courses which are aligned to the market, embedded into current education systems in a manner that people will come out with foundational knowledge relevant to the market and able to convert that skill for their livelihood.

S Janardhan, Global Head – Talent Development at Tata Consultancy Services, said a lot of changes are happening in the context of jobs which are fairly repetitive or well-defined but are still being delivered by dedicated teams.

“Today the ‘gig model’ is taking over jobs. Even at TCS or many others in the IT industry, people are thinking “why do we need to have a dedicated team if the job can be done anywhere so the best talent delivers it in the time that is customised to them,” Janardhan said.

“So jobs get posted to market places and people who have talent and bandwidth and who can contribute, pick those jobs and deliver it,” he added.

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