There is a shortage of digital skills across sectors: Nasscom president

Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh tells Anjuli Bhargava how the non-profit is working to bridge the skills gap and elaborates on its latest initiative, the Future Skills Prime project, for the govt

The Renaissance, as the world understood it, referred to a period of ferment, when new ideas reshaped the way society defined itself and the world — a period marked by the rebirth or revival of classical learning and wisdom. In the 21st century, a new renaissance gripped the world with the emergence of digitisation. Formany born during 1930-1990, mobile connectivity, computers, laptops, the Internet, the World Wide Web and broadband were alien creatures.

But somewhere along the way, the world changed. There’s been a new renaissance, albeit one rather different from the one in the 14th to 17th centuries but equally all-pervasive and redefining society almost as sharply. In a recent article in a daily, Tata chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran called for the need to do “skill training through the prism of powering the digital age”.

All kinds of economic activity moved online overnight because of Covid-19. From paying electricity or water bills to ensuring one’s stocks reach the godowns, warehouses and the customer, almost everyone was forced to align themselves to the new reality. Teachers and students scrambled to deliver lessons online, one of the first crises faced and one that many countries including India are still battling.

The IT industry in India has already been grappling with a situation where the graduates, who enter the workforce, are already in some sense “outdated” in terms of the skills they possess vis-à-vis the demands. But now India is faced with an even bigger challenge: How do you ensure that the tech skills needed to survive in today’s world are imparted across sectors and industries, be it banking, microfinance, insurance, retail or media? Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh tells Anjuli Bhargava how the non-profit is working to bridge the skills gap and elaborates on its latest initiative, the Future Skills Prime project, for the government. Excerpts:

Technology is emerging as a double-edged sword in many ways: can’t live with it, can’t live without it...

We (humans) need a refresh as far as technology goes. I find too many people blaming it like it’s human or a living thing. Across many fora, I hear people say technology has to be “responsible” or it has to be “trustworthy”. Humans have to be responsible or trustworthy, not technology. You cannot ascribe these human characteristics to a lifeless tool. Second, people have to remember that it’s not a magical panacea for all our problems. It has advantages and limitations. We have to assess where it can be useful and where it won’t. We as humans have to know where to draw the line. I don’t see parents, teachers and many other cohorts having this conversation.

Even before the pandemic, jobs were getting displaced. They were not going away but the skills were changing and we were failing to keep pace. I am not referring to just the IT industry but across industries and sectors. Everywhere the skills required have been changing and more and more digital awareness is required. Banking, finance, healthcare and hospitals, education — no matter which industry one looked at, the staff and employees have been grappling with the inroads digitisation has made. What’s more, even before the pandemic, we were still figuring out the new skills required not to be successful but to survive, be it a coder, secretary, teacher, banker, marketeer and so on.

Now, the pandemic has accelerated the pace of digitisation and taken it to another level. Exponential sounds tame. Be it healthcare, finance, retail, telecommunications — across industries, there is a shortage of digital skills. Banks and hospitals are hiring more data scientists and analysts than anyone else today.

Let me cite just one example of education. Teachers and schools have been caught napping when the shutdown happened and everything had to move online overnight. Teachers are unfamiliar with the new tools and even parents are unable to help their children in many cases. There’s suddenly a new elephant room in the room for everyone to manage.

What kind of shortage was there already and what kind of shortfalls are envisaged given the pandemic and subsequent faster pace of digitisation?

Across industries, the demand is already 8X more than supply and this is expected to go up to 20X by 2024. The kind of jobs the advent of artificial intelligence, data science and so on are creating simply didn’t exist before.

Now, the Indian education system is pretty behind the curve, too. There are two problems here. First, there is no way that an education system that takes almost 20 years to churn out the final product can be up to date. The world and its skill requirements are and will keep changing every two years. There is no end goal. Only a very flexible education system can adapt. We have to change our expectations. Education has to create the foundation for an open, trainable and adaptable mind that learns quickly. Above everything, industry looks for a mind that is quick to train.

Second, speaking on the overall education system, I feel the passion for learning has to make a comeback. Today youngsters have a passion for marks, performance, highly paid jobs, but I do feel the passion for learning has taken a hit.

Earlier we emphasised having a strong foundation in math and science. Today, math and science remain important but having the softer skills one learns through liberal arts is equally relevant. In yesterday’s world, a coder would be in the back-end and never come in contact with the client. Today, he needs to sit across the client, understand a client’s problem/business and then customise the solution through his coding skills. There’s a sea change in the skill sets the coder needs to have.

What then is Nasscom doing about both these — building digital skills in IT and the rest of the economy or industries?

We started this in 2018. The industry leaders identified what the problems are going to be in the future. Every single leader came back to say: Shortage of the right kind of talent is going to be the biggest gap. We launched Nasscom Future Skills, a programme that looked at the new technologies (we identified 10) and the new jobs they are creating — like data analysts, robotics managers, data scientists — we built skilling pads with the industry, identifying the basic level of competency required to do these new jobs. You’d be surprised to learn that almost 30-40 per cent of the content we put together was non-technical: project management, communications, design thinking — all became big requirements. A mix of professional and technology skills are required. This was a B2B model. It’s an online portal we built and run. In the last two years, 500,000 people have got skilled using these platforms. In total 1.5-2 million people have been skilled in the last two years through the new initiatives.

Last year, the government (ministry of electronics and IT is financing this) came to us with a very real ask: This is needed well beyond the IT industry. Digital skillsare required by banks, hospitals, manufacturing, governments, teachers, you name it, to survive. That’s when we created a B2C platform called Future Skills Prime, which has been launched quite recently. It will soon be opened up for training for all cohorts including university students, across industries with a view to building employability. The idea is to identify the skills and learning pathways needed to perform a particular job and imparting these. In the next few years, we are aiming to train around four million people through this platform.