The National Skill Development Corporation is now designing coursework to promote skills along with higher education, either as a part of the curriculum or an auxiliary course that will enhance a student’s employability.
Talks are on with universities to help them introduce skill development courses in the mainstream curriculum. “We want developing and cutting-edge technological courses like cybersecurity and data science studies to be introduced here. We are in touch with universities in Singapore, the USA about this,” explained Manish Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, NSDC. “These will be smaller courses but highly employable ones.”
The courses are being designed with a collaboration between the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and the Ministry of Human Resource Development in a way that a student pursuing a course in one subject can take up a course on a totally unrelated subject. “We will also have embedded courses which will be related to the major the student is pursuing. This increases the probability of the candidate of getting a job,” said Kumar.
The Director-General of Training is also working on creating a stack database of not just course material but also employment opportunities. A facility like this is already there in Facebook as a beta version where one can see every job opportunity within a specified radius.
The world is changing now and education is becoming modular. “It’s a chunk of knowledge that you need to consume and capitalise it very fast because in a short while this knowledge will no longer be relevant, something else will be replacing it,” said Kumar.
The NSDC is working on making some structural changes in the field of skill development. “Apprenticeship in the past has often been seen as highly regulated and therefore the industry has been a little sceptical about it. But now it has been simplified,” said Kumar. “ There are some powers that rested with the government servants alone that have now been delegated to the industry bodies.”
Now, the apprenticeship programmes also cover the tertiary or service sectors. “Its a lot more flexible now. If someone wants to go with a skill which is unique to one industry only they can come up with a curriculum and it doesn’t need to be standardised any more,” added Kumar.
The new online portal of the corporation makes the work faster and even the payments are safer this way. Even contracts are being signed digitally.
