Traditional education won't suffice

Today, we are in an era where the phrase "Survival of the Fittest" sums up our core existence. Technology has fastened the pace of the world. Breakthrough innovations happening all around the globe, all the time.Hence, in haste of the high-tech development and robots and bots threatening to take away human roles, the world has embraced a culture of continuous learning and skilling. What is often being forgotten is, it takes human intelligence to make all technology advancements possible and thus it is imperative to match our skills to that of technological intelligence.

The world has embraced automation since centuries, so why fear it now. We only have to prepare ourselves to evolve with it. Quoting a Mckinsey 2017 report, In the 1960s, US President Lyndon Johnson empaneled a "National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress." Among its conclusions was "the basic fact that technology destroys jobs, but not work." This was very profound and so relevant to what we are seeing today.

Zooming in to the Indian landscape, multiple sectors are heeding AI and automation including IT, Retail, Healthcare, BFSI and many more. However, one sector, which is facing the maximum brunt owing to these tech-advancements in business scenarios, is India's IT sector. This is also because IT industry is the fastest to adopt the rapid advancements. One of the biggest challenges, which is still plaguing the IT industry is not finding skilled workforce to perform high-end sophisticated jobs.

In the last few years, the sector went through a turmoil when on one hand it was trying to keep up pace with the world while on the other, it was facing a dearth of talent, which could drive the new wave of innovations. Thankfully, industries and employees have realized that for business as well as individuals to stay relevant and ahead of times, it was important to train manpower in the emerging skills, which are driving transformations across businesses.

Today we are in a phase when both corporates and individuals are taking up employee reskilling on serious note. The way businesses are running today, the skills that the future workforce need in order to thrive and not just survive in jobs are rapidly evolving. Innovation driven by technology, evolving business demands are commanding the need for reskilling of the entire workforce.

Organisations across sectors also play a crucial role in facilitating employee re-education or reskilling. Furthering industry-academia partnership and encouraging sector-specific upskilling and reskilling of workforces will lead to quality learning. This will also result in producing more industry-ready talent. Organizations have also strengthened in-house L&D facilities to train and upskill their talent pool. This approach has also become a very welcome move by employees. Most organizations are also reinventing their employee education policies to attract top talents and retain the best of talents.

Young employees today are also looking at learning new skill and honing their already acquired skills by on the job learning. Many employees consider peer-to-peer learning as a great way to acquiring new skills and learning about advanced technologies. Learning on the job has become a new norm.

Government has also over time given an emphasis on skilling the Indian youth and in facilitating reskilling initiatives to brace our youth and the India Inc to combat the emerging technology race. In its maiden budget, Modi Govt 2.0, has announced various schemes and proposals to boost the educational ecosystem and bring Indian higher education at par the global standards. From allocating funds to upgrade our educational institutions to "World Class Institutions", suggesting rigorous regulatory reforms in education system to preparing the Indian youth for overseas jobs by focusing on training globally valued and in demand skills like AI, IoT, Virtual Reality, Big Data, 3D printing, Robotics, etc.

To sum it precisely, the entire process of reskilling demands serious acknowledgement from corporates and individuals alike. To create a talent pool that is ready to take the technology challenge and for individuals to stay relevant to the ever-evolving technology scape, "Learning must go on". It is time that all stakeholders including students, professionals, industries, government, academia, quality faculties, the emerging education technology providers must come together to co-create and sustain an ecosystem, which recognizes continuous learning and quality reskilling as the new normal.