Building India’s Digital Talent Stack…the journey till now..

As per IMF’s World Economic Outlook Database (2019); and UN DESA (2019), between 2020 and 2030, India will have more than 91.6 million young people reaching the working-age and ready to join the workforce, making her the largest emerging workforce provider to the world! To put the nos in perspective, in the same period, 67.6Million people will drop out of China’s workforce due to an aging population.

This is a mind-boggling number and fact. Especially when applied through the lens of job shifts and changing skill landscape driven by the rapid advancement in technology. The one question Indian govt should be asking is whether we are doing enough as a country to ensure these 91.6Million young people will be employable … will they have the skills needed for the new jobs that will prevail 10 years from now?

With this question in mind, we approached the Government towards the end of last year to recommend a joint national reskilling/upskilling initiative to ensure we are building a talent pool that is employable and relevant.

NASSCOM had launched a major reskilling initiative, the NASSCOM Future Skills in 2018, aimed at reskilling and upskilling the employees in the IT industry. The initiative, launched by our Respected Prime Minister in Feb 2018, gained tremendous traction in the industry and today more than 100 companies are leveraging the platform to upskill more than 200000 employees. Digital Talent development became Job 1 at NASSCOM as we realized its tremendous importance on the industry and the nation, and we set ourselves a very BIG and ambitous goal is to work with Industry and Gov’t to reskill and upskill a minimum of 2 Million IT employees by the end of 2025.

Encouraged by the response we were getting for Future Skills, NASSCOM and MEITY started discussing the possibility to create a B2C version of the platform that would now enable the upskilling and reskilling of tech professionals across industries… be it healthcare, education, manufacturing etc. and also the faculty and students in higher education institutes, to ensure a steady pipeline. Thus, it was born - NASSCOM Future Skills Prime! Prime stood for Programme for Reskilling/ Upskilling of IT Manpower for Employability.. and our goal was to create an India Digital Talent Stack that would enable us to drive digital skilling at scale in India and accelerate the development of skills needed for the changing job landscape.

Since then, NASSCOM and MEITY teams have worked for ~18 months, hand in hand, to create a robust framework for the India Digital Talent Stack, called Future Skills Prime.

And we were thrilled to have the initiative announced this week by the Union Minister for Electronics and IT Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad as he approved the expansion of the Future Skills initiative to Future Skills Prime – targeting industry professionals across different segments, higher education students and government officials, with the goal to train around 4 lakh professionals in the next three years.

In a bold move, the Government of India announced it will invest Rs. 436 Crore over a period of three years for the development and deployment of the initiative.

 The Salient Features of Future Skills PRIME/Digital Talent Stack are as follows:

·       It will offer diagnostics for learner preference and skill gaps leading to the identification of relevant courses.

·       It will help in building digital fluencies in emerging technologies.

·       It will offer online upskilling in identified skill competencies.

·       It will offer blended programmes with online and classroom training.

·       It will enable the assessment and certification of learners in line with industry needs and Government standards.

·       Each learner will get a Skills Passport where competencies acquired by the learner will get accumulated.

·       Every learner will get a Skills Wallet where s/he will have the opportunity to get up to Rs. 12,000 from the Government of India as an incentive upon certification. 

·       This digital platform is being developed in strong partnerships with the IT Industry, academia and government. Apart from the industry, the existing infrastructure of CDAC and NIELIT centers will also be leveraged as resource centers in the hub and spoke model.

·       The data center for this digital platform will be kept in India.

 I am thrilled to note that with the aim to upskill/ reskill over 4 Lakh IT professionals in emerging technologies, Future Skills PRIME will be one of the largest government-led digital skilling initiatives globally and the first Digital Talent Stack ever!

 In today’s world, companies and countries are fighting the war on talent… whoever has the right talent, wins the war. By taking this huge step, the Government of India has shown a very serious commitment and is walking the talk on digital talent development. For NASSCOM, this is a dream come true! Our vision is to ensure that when the world thinks Digital, the world will think of India, and this important step forward will strengthen India’s focus on Digital Talent Development which is key to the realization of our vision. We are committed to working hand in hand with Government to make Digital Talent, one of India’s key competitive advantages and establish India as THE Hub for Digital Talent, globally.