Explained: Where is the maximum employability gap?

The Indian economy has managed to grow based on the service sector. IT/ITES is one of the largest contributors to India’s GDP. In 2019, 53 percent of Indian businesses were unable to hire candidates due to a lack of future skills. According to the ILO, in 2019 several job positions that required future skills remained unfulfilled owing to the skill gap that exists across various industries.

The service sector relies almost exclusively on a skilled workforce and as the confluence of business and technology continues most jobs will be redefined to be knowledge oriented. We are seeing several industries where the employability gap is ever increasing as more and more future skills-oriented jobs are created. These sectors include not only the traditional IT/ITES but also traditional sectors such as banking and financial services, manufacturing, pharma & healthcare, telecommunications, and infrastructure.

BFSI sector

The BFSI sector for one has been completely disrupted by the digital age. More and more job profiles within banks, insurance companies, lending companies, and other financial service providers are evolving into digital and tech-centric roles. However, as the employability survey of 2019 revealed 80 percent of Indian engineers were unfit for knowledge-based roles and only around 4.6 percent of Indian job aspirants were good at coding.

All in all BFSI applicants were wholly unprepared for the new wave of future skills-oriented jobs waiting for them. The employability gap is most evident for skills such as UX design, cybersecurity, AI, data analytics, and blockchain to name a few.

Another such sector is the pharma and health services sector including pharma manufacturing, e-commerce, hospital, clinical,l and allied health service providers. India is the largest provider of generic drugs globally and Indian companies supply over 50% of the global demand for various vaccinations.

This is a huge sector that is highly underserved in terms of skill enhancement. As technology is further integrated into how we manufacture drugs and run our healthcare services more and more new roles are created to support digital healthcare. Some of the important skills here would be AI, ML, IoT, data analytics, and e-commerce management.

Employment gap

Of course, the employment gap is not restricted to these two industries but rather transcends across all industry segments as digital and technology become the way of life.

The skills that are contributing to the employability gap can be categorized into hard skills and soft skills.

Hard Skills – These are taught skills which an employer can easily define and measure for their employees. Some of the most in-demand skills across industry segments include

– UX Design

– Data Science

– AIML

– Blockchain

Article by Prof. Col. Shishir Kumar, Director General, ImaginXP.

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