With the world moving towards technological adoption, new-age professions in the area of Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Web 3.0, and Data Science are on the rise. This has created a need for a skilled workforce in the industry. This has further led to edtech firms creating courses to meet the demand. “Learning and providing employment support are two sides of the same coin. It needs to be considered a two-step process towards bridging the massive skill gap in the IT industry. While preparing learners with the in-demand skills, it is also imperative that they be exposed to the right environment that will enable them to apply these skills,” Abhimanyu Saxena, co-founder, Scaler and InterviewBit, told FE Online.
Skill-based courses are the need of the hour to fulfil the industry requirement of skilled professionals, and the demand for such courses and certifications are also on the rise from the learners’ side. According to Great Learning’s ‘Upskilling Outlook in India 2022’ report, upskilling is the only way to survive with the changing industry demands. A higher intent towards upskilling is witnessed in 2022 with the emergence of newer domains like web 3.0, metaverse, NFTs and more. In 2022, 79% of people still plan to upskill, with another 11% people are on the fence.
As a result, several ed-tech players such as PlanetSpark offer skill-based courses at the K-12 level. “Degrees and traditional subjects have become outdated and irrelevant. Thus, parents are now focused on developing the right skills in their kids instead of choosing a career for them. Additionally, there have been increasing policies around making school education more application-based and mandating skill-based subjects. Furthermore, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 introduced provisions for skill-based education in schools and further accelerated the process. Lastly, ed-tech has solved the problem of access to skill-based education while helping all students and young adults in the country develop their skills from their homes,” Maneesh Dhooper, co-founder, PlanetSpark, said.
Further, findings from Coursera’s Campus Skills Report 2022, revealed that in 2020, employers in India posted about 3,79,000 openings for cloud-related roles alone. The report further stated that the nature of jobs and skills is changing and by 2025, 85 million jobs may not exists, on the contrary 97 million new jobs may rise. Many of these new jobs will be centred on cognitive skills such as decision-making and creativity, social and emotional skills like collaboration and project management, and technology skills, such as software programming, machine learning, and product design will also be in demand. For Brijesh Kohli, director Xebia Academy, ed-tech firms have begun to focus more on enticing learners for jobs rather than providing them with a continuous learning path. “The model which based providing jobs is more sellable but the primary focus should be on skill acquisition, with career prospects coming as a corollary,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Government has also introduced policies like the importance of skill-based education National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF) and the National Education Policy (NEP), to be implemented at the school level to make children future-ready fulfilling the talent gap. Whether it is for students or professionals, skill-based courses will define the future of the job market by fulfilling the talent gap. However, the ed-tech sector being at the forefront, is required to introduce new-age courses and make necessary changes to their existing course curriculum to meet the industry requirements.
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