. The payment of the application fee can be made until January 3, 2025. Additionally, applicants will have the opportunity to make corrections to their application forms from January 4 to January 5, 2025.](https://highereducationplus.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Beige-Black-Modern-Professional-Fashion-Photographers-Facebook-Cover-1-360x180.jpg)
By Ankit Shyamsukha, CEO, ICA Edu Skills
Now that the digital era has flourished more than ever, how can the skill education sector leverage this new medium and prepare the country for a new-age economy? Here’s a rundown of my thoughts.
High-Quality Content Dissemination
The skill education sector can leverage by preparing, curating and using this off-the-shelf high-quality standardised material (such as video lectures) for dissemination. If the content is customised, based on the needs, level and budget of the learner, it would help him to learn at his own pace.
Better Training Facilities for Supporting Staff
Digitisation also makes it easier for the governments and industry authorities to recognise and give accreditation and certification to training programmes and material. For instance, a start-up can avail instruction/training material from global leaders to train or upskill its staff online. This would catalyse an organic market-based instruction/training material ecosystem in a B2B as well as B2C mode.
Free Live Interactions with One Point of Contact
With COVID pressing the panic button, there is not only a spike in ed-tech companies, but also some traditional technology giants are offering free-to-use video conferencing and group interaction apps for collaborative learning. These apps and platforms can facilitate live instructions from a single point of delivery to an extraordinary number of learners previously inconceivable. This way they can learn irrespective of geographies and time zones making it even more helpful.
Flexibility to Choose both Online & Classroom Training
Some of the Skill Education providers have made it easier than ever to provide training support with the flexibility to choose both classroom and online training. However, they must also explore collaboration with those ed-tech companies and applications which take into account the low internet bandwidth and erratic connections which is a major challenge in our country. They must provide ample solutions to cope with these real-world challenges, especially in rural areas.
Higher Demand for Banking, Finance, and IT Services Training
With a ripple effect created on the Indian labour market, there has been a demand for professionals in the field of Banking, Finance, AI, machine learning, data science and mobile development, among others. This is both a challenge and an opportunity. According to an employability assessment firm, only 3% of engineers in India have new-age technological skills.
Worse, over 80% of graduate engineers passing out of universities in India are unemployable. With digitisation going mainstream, this skill deficit can be redressed through world-class training material.
With the Indian online education market set to reach INR 360.3 billion by 2024, the skill education sector must be ready to cope with the change itself. Digitisation has made the earlier on the job training in a simulated environment even more intuitive and ‘real workplace-ready’. The skill provider can combine this apprenticeship model of learning either with online, onsite, on-campus learning or in any desired mix.
