Employability

Employability refers to the skill, knowledge and other factors that enable a person to gain employment. It includes factors such as education, training, experiences, interpersonal skill etc.

According to Wheebox India Skills Report 2023

•  India’s employable talent has risen in the past year, according to The Wheebox India Skills Report 2023. According to the report, India’s employable workforce has increased from 46.2 per cent to 50.3 per cent which means that 50.3 per cent of people were found to be employable as compared to the last year’s data.
• The percentage of the employable women workforce has increased to 52.8%, compared to 47.2% for men. The report also points out that 89% of graduates were actively seeking internship opportunities.

The QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2022 were recently released. The report reveals that no Indian Higher Education Institution is in the top 100 and only 3 HEI can make a place in the top 200. This shows the employability crisis of Indian graduates.

As the Indian market grows, the demand for more skilled workers will grow. So, India should invest in skilling its youth for meeting the demands of the future job market.

Reasons for lack of employability

1. Lack of employable skills: One of the main reasons behind the high youth unemployment rate in India is that schools even today are training students from a young age in skills that have no use in the market in the future. World Economic Forum Report also highlighted the need for skills of the future, especially those that involve technology, such as programming, data science, big data, machine learning, AI, web development, etc.
2. Obsession with “honourable” jobs: Indian society puts a high value on graduates and white-collar jobs and often ends up neglecting those with adequate vocational skills or those who have completed on-the-job training.
3. Poor communication skill: In today’s era, good communication skill is necessary, as our economy is expanding to other countries also. Employers want to recruit people who posses good communication skills so he/she can deal with foreign clients also.
4. Dynamic nature of job market: The job market is changing faster,candidate who does not equip with new technology or adapt themselves to changing nature of jobs find it challenging to get employment.
5. Rising trend of voluntary unemployment: While the lack of sufficient job creation could lead to resentment due to people’s high aspirations, Niti Aayog member Bibek Debroy, flagged a dramatic rise in voluntary unemployment across the country, where people choose not to work below a certain income level after ‘investing’ in education.
6. Low labour force participation of women: After recording some improvement in recent years, India’s notoriously low female labour force participation rate (LFPR) seems to have stagnated, data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS July 2021-June 2022) shows. 29.4% of women (aged 15-59) were part of India’s labour force in 2021-22, as compared to 29.8% in the preceding year. In contrast, men’s LFPR improved from 80.1% in 2020-21 to 80.7% in 2021-22.
7. Less growth of the employment-intensive industry: Less growth of employment-intensive industries like manufacturing, textile etc are a major problem. The skill-intensive service industry is unable to absorb the workforce,as these jobs require high-level skills.