According to the NSDC, the growing skills gap in India is estimated to be more than 25 crore workers by 2022.

While the economy continues to average a decent growth rate, the demand for labour is increasing tenfold. But as we know, the real issue we are faced with is not a lack of jobs, but a lack of skilled, corporate-ready talent that can keep pace with the expanding and changing needs of industry. This situation is obviously frustrating for students who can't find jobs as well as organizations who find it increasingly hard to fill vacancies.

The growing skills gap is an issue that has been heavily discussed and analysed, but will only continue to increase in criticality.Because the fact is that every year over 30 lakh graduates enter the Indian job market, but only about 5 lakh are considered employable. While myriad solutions to this problem have been suggested, if we go back to the basic building blocks required for a well-functioning educational system which supplies our job market adequately, it is clear that India is sorely missing one important component- a reliable instructional infrastructure to address the sheer scale of students, especially in certain life skill areas.

Moreover, due to our over-dependence on rote learning and textbook-led style of teaching, young graduates entering the workforce are not equipped with the right skills they need to qualify as work-ready. This often requires corporations to make additional investments in onboarding and training programs for new recruits which address interpersonal and communication issues that should ideally not be there in the first place. With about 1.2 crore individuals joining the workforce every year, tackling the skills gap is crucial to avoid derailment of the India growth story.

The increased focus on corporate CSR is a step in the right direction as many companies are opting to spend on building up the educational infrastructure as a part of this mandatory investing. Initiatives like Campus to Corporate programs, Vocational Training and special courses for less privileged students are gaining popularity. These investments also lead to a flow of appropriately skilled talent for companies while helping reduce the overall unemployed and underemployed figures.

The Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School is one such attempt to address the skills gap, under which we have introduced a pioneering concept of India Futures: License To Train. This program has been designed to equip aspirational and existing trainers with international standards of training delivery, a recognized license, globally validated curriculum and the opportunity for trainers to generate their own self-sustaining revenue flows for life. It tackles the crux of the problem at its heart, creating a robust skilling system which would expectantly help India to utilize its demographic dividend for years to come.

It is the hope that with increased efforts of the private sector to propose social innovations and prop up the efforts of the government's skill development initiatives, that the goals of Skill India are met and our economy can function at its competitive best.