Punjab focuses on bridging skill gap

Punjab Government is all set to give a big push to ‘Skill Punjab’ to meet human resource requirement of upcoming industries and to ensure they were fully prepared to meet the global competition. It was imperative for the state to focus on skills and training for productivity and competitive edge, said Punjab's Industrial Training and Technical Education secretary RK Verma while speaking during the session — ‘Skilling India for Global Competitiveness: Plugging the Skill Gap’ on Friday. 

He said that the key challenges to the skill development are strengthening State Skill Development Missions, private sector participation in skill development, expanding outreach of skilling programmes, availability of trainers, making skill inspirational, career guidance and post training placement tracking. 

Verma underlined the need for skill training with regard to demand, effective counselling and guidance.

“India has a huge advantage of its demographic dividend with 65 per cent of its population under the age of 35 years. However, the manner in which it will use the opportunity will determine whether it will reap its demographic dividend,” said PHD Chamber Chandigarh Committee chairman Vikram Sahgal.He said that India must stress and invest in education and training so that it is able to achieve its target of double digit inclusive growth.

About 63 per cent of the school students drop out at different stages before reaching Class X. Only about 2.5 million vocational training seats are available in the country whereas about 12.8 million persons enter the labour market every year, he added.