Swiss skill building model advocated

INDIA ECONOMIC SUMMIT 2008

The model involves companies training master trainers and providing apprenticeships to fresh hands, who undertake a mix of field work and classroom learning.

India, which is reeling under a skills shortage with just two per cent of its workforce being trained, can borrow an idea from Switzerland, which has offered to share with India its formula of skilling through the apprenticeship method.

This was revealed today by a former president of the Swiss Chamber of Commerce, Sushil Premchand, at the India Economic Summit. The idea was hailed by participants at a session on ‘a skills shortage after the brain drain’, who said India should grab it.

The Swiss Commerce Minister, who was in India, has exchanged details of the idea with Industry and Commerce Minister Kamal Nath.

Explaining the model, Premchand, who is managing director of PRS Services AG in Switzerland, said that the industry or participating companies train master trainers and then provide apprenticeships to fresh hands for a fixed period. Trainees work in the field for four days and attend classes for two days. It is a rigorous method but at the end of it, the trainee emerges a qualified hand equipped for a job in the market.

Soumitra Dutta, dean of external relations at INSEAD in France, who moderated the session, said that in Germany, which also followed the model, children were forced to leave school after the sixth form if they were found to be not interested in academics, and were sent for apprenticeship.

Jeffrey Joerres, Chairman and CEO of Manpower, USA, said that India should get its act together fast if it was not to be left behind by other contenders like Argentina and Mexico in the race for supply of manpower in the global market.

There was despondency among industrialists attending the session about the huge gap between demand and supply in skilled manpower. It will be 56.5 million by 2020, speakers pointed out.

Anand Sudarshan, managing director, Manipal Education, said scalability was as much an issue as the linking of training with experience. He said the regulatory mechanism was stopping scalability and thus there are only instances like NIITs and Aptechs when it comes to training, and no more.

Rohit Kumar, president, Educomp Solutions, said while IITs produced 800 graduates a year, the country needs to produce seven million graduates a year. The country had failed to create educational opportunities for these millions, he said.

Higher education institutions were not scaling up. For 99 per cent of the population there was no capacity being created and there was a lack of quality in education, he said.