Letters: The right skill set

Online skill development has become a necessary ingredient of human resource management

Sanjay Kumar Singh’s personal finance article, “Reskill to survive” (March 14), offers useful tips for those who by chance or by choice took up a career in the information technology sector. 

Online skill development or on-the-job reskilling has become a necessary ingredient of human resource management. It goes beyond survival skills of employees or shop-floor requirements of industries.

In 2013, when Raghuram Rajan talked about a career horizon of 10 years for professionals, many did not take him seriously. India was yet to gauge the implications of an employee’s skills becoming obsolete if he or she stayed in the same workplace for a long period. People thought postmen, station masters, clerks, teachers, hotel managers and political leaders would remain where they were for decades. But jobs nowadays need current skills, whether one is a farmer or a scientist. 

The significance of on-the-job reskilling, acquiring new skills for migration to other work areas and learning more to prepare oneself for taking on higher responsibilities needs to be understood in the right spirit by policymakers, employers and educational institutions (from primary schools to business schools). 

As employment prospects improve with economic development, need-based skill development has to be integrated with education policy and HR practices of government and private sector organisations. Else, there would be a shortage of the right people for the right jobs sooner than we can imagine.

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