How we are making Young Indians more employable by equipping them with Basic & Advanced Digital Skills

The Situation:

There are in excess of 1,00,00,000 youth registered on the National Career Services (NCS)
portal with the Ministry of Labor and Employment of India. Many of these youth lack basic
digital literacy, which makes them unfit to take up many of the employment opportunities
that are open today. World Economic Forum in 2016 has defined 16 different skills out of
which ICT literacy is one of the five core skills that an individual will need to survive the 21st
century. If you look at a job board, nearly three out of five job roles would need some form
of digital skills. Whether the job role is in sales or office management which are common
across the country and spread down to the smallest towns in India with MSME hiring in large
numbers, digital skills enable you to perform these job roles. Microsoft Corporation whose
office suite is now very much a hygiene factor in the workspace, partnered with the Ministry
of Labor and Employment to skill youth registered with the National Career Services (NCS)
portal on office tools and some more advanced courses which will allow youth to take up job
roles in that need artificial intelligence or business analytics and more.

The Solution:

TMI has been chosen as a partner by Microsoft to roll this out on the ground pan-India.
The target is to make an impact on nearly 300,000 youth over an 18 month period. TMI
followed a sequence of steps to ensure successful offtake of the courses and make a
strong impact on the ground. TMI looked at typical job roles that are available in different
geographies and worked with Microsoft to identify a certain set of courses that would be
relevant for this audience. Since the numbers to be covered are large, TMI layered the
courses in three formats – (1) self-paced learning (2) Virtual Instructor Led Training (vILT) in
large format classes and Face-to-face Training with lab work. TMI configured the Microsoft
training community platform as the base engine for skill-building and got it integrated with
the NCS portal. In addition to targeting youth from the NCS portal, TMI mobilizes youth
from various campuses around the country to also pick up these skills and improve their
employability prospects.

The Impact:

To date, TMI has mobilized 63,000+ numbers, trained 15,980 numbers in self-learning
mode, 46,670 numbers in vILT mode. Many of the beneficiaries have been chosen from
small towns with significant numbers of women (42%). Along with scaling them in the digital
space, TMI has also invested efforts in the employability skills of the beneficiaries to help
them source & pick up jobs.
About 200,000 young Indians are expected to learn in self-paced formats, 120,000 in vILT
format, and 2400 would be skilled in advanced IT areas such as AI and Data Analytics in
classrooms attached to the Ministry of Labor Career Centers.