How is Skill India revolutionizing tech education in 2026? Explore practical solutions for bridging the skill gap in AI, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies.
Future Skills | A NASSCOM initiative
The Practical Solutions to Skill Gap in the Emerging Tech Future of India. Effective closing of the skill gap to create a future-ready workforce is now a pressing national need as technology is continually transforming the global industries.
FutureSkills Prime, a joint initiative by NASSCOM and the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is India’s leading technology skilling ecosystem for the purpose of reskilling and upskilling students and working professionals.
The platform provides industry-recognised training, aligned with the NSQF, in high-growth areas with government-backed incentives and NASSCOM certifications that align directly to the National Occupational Standards (NOS).
Participants acquire practical skills and knowledge in key emerging areas, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Generative AI, Data Science & Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, and Internet of Things (IoT), while also developing vital professional skills to drive career advancement and adapt to the changing needs of the global tech economy.
Potential Solutions to Skill
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The possible solutions for Skill India in Emerging Technology is given below.The following are the possible solutions for Skill India in Emerging Technology. Bridging the Skill Gap
In 4 years, India will have the world’s largest workingforce, 87 crore in total[1]. The potential of the projected demographic dividend to boost India’s potential isn’t guaranteed. The number of people depending on the GDP will be outgrown by our labor force or working population, which is enhancing GDP.
According to a paper written by Shekar Aiyar and Ashok Mody, it is projected that over next two decades in India, the increasing demographic dividend could add 2% points per annum to India’s GDP growth.
The figure however is dependent upon the efficient policy decisions to provide a solid foundation for this number and the absence of such policies will result in a big disaster – a demographic disaster. One such policy investment is skilling India. Bridging the Skill Gap
The present government is aware of and appreciative of the problem and is working on programs to provide resources for millions but at a much lower level of cognitive skills. The big question is, can we have sufficient policy framework that will skill India in emerging technologies?
Furthermore, the IT Industry job scenario is changing as automation is increasingly adopted into the industry, and newer technologies (including disruptive technologies) are emerging. Due to this, new job roles requiring different skill-sets are appearing and earlier jobs based on older skill-sets are losing their relevance.
According to an estimate from nasscom, the total IT-BPM employees in India (as on FY 2017-2018) are around 3.9 million. However, with increasing automation, the presence of disruptive and new technologies, etc., Bridging the Skill Gap approximately 30% of the existing workforce would need to be re-skilled to remain relevant while approximately 50-60% of the workforce would need re-skilling continuously.
Paragraph Bridging the Skill Gap
The solution for skilling has to be multi-pronged and can expand to multiple spheres of society and economy. Bridging the Skill Gap Skilling can be trained via an exclusive skilling mechanism for the target audience that needs to be skued.
Based on the target audience there are likely solutions that we can consider – students who are part of the high school ecosystem, Bridging the Skill Gap students who have graduated from a STEM course, students who have graduated and are looking for jobs, employees of IT/ITeS sector, etc.
Educational Institutions (High School)– Catch them when they are young There are a large number of students graduating from school in India. Their curriculum revolves around the subjects like Science, Commerce, and Humanities.
Much more emphasis should be laid upon the emergent population which will be coming out of schools and into colleges in the target industry for skilling India. If we can start to educate them about the basics of technology, Bridging the Skill Gap which is yet to come, from a young age, it will benefit them in taking advanced studies on topics where future is assured to be tougher.
National level initiatives to propose skilling policy can include a month long training on the Foundations of futuristic technology or probably open incubation centers in each school and promote the technologies to inculcate participatory learning from students to self-invest in their learning.
Report by UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Technology and Innovation Report[4] shows that India is having the maximum number of students pursuing their bachelor’s in the field of Science, Bridging the Skill Gap, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects globally. In 2016-2017, 10.7 million students were taking science, engineering/ technology or computer science courses.
UNCTAD stressed on the rapid technological progress which will require to skill the labor force on broader range of skills, to secure livelihood and increase employability. UNCTAD pointed out that the educational establishments were not following the technological developments in this transition period.
This needs the educational institution to restructure the existing core curriculum in such a way that basic and advanced courses on futuristic technology are also included in the curriculum and students can choose them as part of their higher education years.
A collaborative central and state effort is required to provide awareness to these educational institutes on the imminent threat of these technologies, and the importance of making sure their students are ready before entering the work force.
Learning Systems for Industry- Industry is also beginning to understand that they need to reskill/ upskill their current employees to ensure their relevance to new job roles being created with this wave. They are investing in doing deep diagnostics to learn about the status of their workforce and designing suitable career pathway for them to pursue.
They are developing a comprehensive learning environment to continually upskill their workforce with new skills and technology. Since it will be challenging to create/maintain physical training infrastructure to match with the emerging technical requirements due to the high rate of technological obsolescence coupled with faster peaking of newer technologies appearing on the horizon, practically within about 6-12 months’ time.
Taking into consideration that the working professionals are unable to attend the regular training programs held in class-room training platforms, providing them with an alternative on-line learning platform with multiple skilling options for them to learn any-time, any-where, and self-paced, is more suitable to encourage any-time, any-where self-paced learning to acquire newer and Industry relevant skill-sets.
There are several online learning ecosystems emerging to offer an easy space to learn new technology; Bridging the Skill Gap but platform-reported completion rates of courses are very low. To have a common resource pool to benefit from and create a rewarding system so a self-participatory life cycle is created, industry cooperation is needed.
To cater to these requirements, a ‘Re-Skilling/ Up-Skilling Framework – FutureSKills’ platform which is technology enabled, for the employees of IT sector, was set up by an Industry initiative. The Prime Minister of India launched Futureskills platform for the B2B skilling in February 2018 Bridging the Skill Gap which offers an online ecosystem and marketplace for industry to participate in the skilling journey of India.
Government designed learning spaces- Government itself has also felt the need of Skill India, and has introduced schemes to meet the mass skilling needs like Skill India, Bridging the Skill Gap DDU-GKY, PMKVY and so on. However these schemes do not focus on any of the disruptive futuristic technology.
Government’s policy architecture needs a shift towards creating spaces to skill its large population on technology which will change the landscape of every industry. Even to make this billion dollar dream work from this industry, Bridging the Skill Gap the one which is behind it should be well trained and skilled. Furthermore, the need to develop a solid digital infrastructure to achieve and support the current skilling dream exists.
Government + Industry + Academia – Public Private Partnership Model – The 4th industrial revolution will impact each and every industry at a quick pace. Localized efforts will not be able to reap a lot of benefits from the upcoming trend. Therefore a totally new idea is needed to create a huge skilling ecosystem.
The three stakeholders, namely Government, Industry and the academia should work together to develop this infrastructure.
This mechanism needs to start from the scratch – from building industry verified curriculum, creating and using course aligned to the curriculum, Bridging the Skill Gap developing a platform to propagate the content, analyzing the end result of the learning through assessment, etc.
This framework will aim at maximizing learning and participation in achieving a one stop solution for Indians to understand, Bridging the Skill Gap learn and skill themselves on the new wave of technology and be prepared to adapt with the changing world.
Hence, my idea of an ideal scenario would be that the Government of Indian must supplement the efforts of Industry by strengthening and institutionalizing the framework from both the sides – supply as well demand.
A joint action by Government, Industry and Academia, as Team India Model, Bridging the Skill Gap for Re-Skilling & Capacity Building will be the best solution.
Skill India in the context of Emerging Technology, the following options are considered:Given below are the possible solutions to Skill India in Emerging Technology: