India produces over 3 million new graduates every year. Research shows that over 25% of the new graduates are utterly unemployable in organized sector; not due to any hypothetical innate inability but because these young hopefuls have not been provided with employable skills during their years in the formal academic life. And I am quite sure that the same is true for almost all emerging nations whether China, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa or Bangladesh.
So we are faced with a crazy situation of high unemployment rate while organizations are facing a severe shortage of skilled resources, due to antiquated syllabus in educational institutes that focus on rote learning rather than practical skills and poor teaching infrastructure. But if India has to take advantage of its much-touted demographic dividend,; we need to align the individual skills with the jobs at hand. And we cannot be satisfied with just one-time training, as the skills needed to perform a task, and sometimes the task itself, keep changing.
At SkillSign, our aim is to build a platform that allows individuals, academic institutes and employers to assess skills of any kind and then benchmark them against the peer group.
