Upgraded National Career Service portal to give job market a fillip

May leverage AI, ML to make it more efficient; launch in 6-8 mths

The Centre plans to upgrade the nine-year-old National Career Service (NCS) portal to link millions of youths with prospective employers in a bid to prepare a future-ready workforce, two government officials said.

The ministry of labour and employment, which is working on the upgraded version of the portal — NCS 2.0 — plans to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to make it more efficient.

The launch may take six-nine months, one of the officials cited above told Business Standard.

Apart from that, the upgraded version of NCS will have micro sites for states and districts. 

 

“This will help in building a network starting from the district to the state and the country. As a result, the data will be centralised and on a single portal. It will help jobseekers connected with local jobs and the kind of skill sets in demand,” the second official said.

The portal brings together job seekers, employers, career counsellors, placement organisations and government departments on a single digital platform.

Currently, NCS is integrated with more than 50 portals, including Udyam for micro, small and medium industries (MSMEs), Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), E-Shram and private job portals, such as TeamLease and Monster.com, among others.

That apart, 22 states’ job portals are integrated with NCS and seven states are directly using it.

“The revamped version of the portal is expected to be efficient in terms of job matching since it will be driven by AI. The RFP (request for proposal) for NCS 2.0 has been floated,” the official said.

During the financial year 2023-24 (FY24), more than 10 million vacancies were mobilised on NCS, up from almost 3.5 million during the previous financial year. As many as 1.6 million employers were available on the portal in FY24.

“The surge in job vacancies underscores the resilience of the economy and it’s a gradual recovery from the challenges posed by the global pandemic. As industries adapt to new norms and embrace digital transformation, diverse opportunities are emerging across sectors. These range from technology and healthcare to manufacturing and hospitality,” said the NCS newsletter for March.

Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder, Teamlease Services, said the NCS portal saw a warm reception among recruiters a decade ago. However, with changing times and technology, NCS quite lost the plot.

“At a time when technologies such as AI and ML made great inroads in the field of recruitment, NCS portal quite lost the plot as it did not undergo any major revamp. It's a welcome step that the government is now looking to upgrade the portal,” Chakraborty said. 

“Recruitment is quite a dynamic process and the portal needs to keep pace with these changes for recruiters to keep using it,” she added.