Workforce opportunity depends on skills
India will supply nearly a quarter of the world’s incremental workforce over the next decade, more than any other country. The demographic dividend that policymakers have long spoken of is no longer a distant prospect; it is arriving in real time, at the rate of roughly ten to twelve million new job-market entrants every year. Whether this abundance translates into national prosperity or into frustration depends less on how many degrees the country awards and more on what those degrees are actually worth in an economy that no longer waits for education to catch up.
The India Skills Report 2025 places the employability of Indian graduates at 54.81 per cent, an improvement over 33 per cent a decade ago, but still a sobering statistic. Roughly one in two graduates walks out of the university system unprepared for the workplace they are entering. Management education fares better at 78 per cent and engineering at 71.5 per cent, but the aggregate picture points to a persistent, structural mismatch between what higher education produces and what industry needs.
A second, faster shift now compounds that mismatch. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 39 per cent of workers’ core skills will change by 2030 and that 22 per cent of all jobs will be materially disrupted. Sixty-three per cent of employers cite the skills gap as the single biggest barrier to their transformation plans, a striking figure because it identifies a problem that no amount of hiring can fix. You cannot hire your way out of a market where the required skills do not yet exist at scale.
The National Education Policy of 2020 anticipated much of this. Its provisions for mandatory internships, credit-based experiential learning and multidisciplinary curricula were, in effect, an attempt to institutionalise the very habits industry had been requesting for a generation. The UGC has since operationalised the framework, and AICTE has established more than four hundred IDEA Labs across technical institutions. But the policy scaffolding is only as strong as the industry participation that fills it. In too many institutions, industry engagement still means a guest lecture in the sixth semester and a placement drive in the eighth - episodic touchpoints that fall well short of embedded co-creation.
The institutions closing this gap are those treating industry not as a hiring channel but as a co-author of the learning experience itself. When Chandigarh University Online co-designs its Online MBA in Business Analytics with KPMG, embeds PwC India, PMI and Harvard Business Publishing certifications into its flagship Online MBA, and builds its Online MCA curriculum around Microsoft’s certifications, the underlying premise is the same: if employers know which skills they need, they must sit at the table when those skills are taught.
None of this, individually, is sufficient. What is required is a shift in mindset: from viewing industry-academia collaboration as institutional goodwill to treating it as an infrastructure investment.
India’s demographic clock does not stop for good intentions. The next decade will decide whether the world’s largest young workforce becomes an economic engine. That decision will not be made in a boardroom or a ministry. It will be made in the classroom and by industries standing beside universities.
The writer is Vice-Chancellor, Chandigarh University; Views presented are personal.
