Unleashing the Future: The Ever-Evolving Landscape of Student Up-Skilling
In an era characterized by a new explosion of scientific knowledge and a growing array of complex societal problems, students will need to apply their knowledge in unknown and evolving circumstances. In today's age of globalization and technological volatility, skill building is an important instrument to increase the efficacy and quality of labor for improved productivity and economic growth.
For this, they will need a broad range of skills, including cognitive and meta-cognitive skills (e.g., critical thinking, creative thinking, learning to learn, and self-regulation); social and emotional skills (e.g., empathy, self-efficacy, and collaboration); and practical and physical skills (e.g., using new information and communication technology devices).
As per the current trends in higher education and employment, we recommend upskilling students in the following domains:
Digital Skills
Digital skills make up 70% of the fastest-growing skills worldwide. Creating a technology-enabled learning ecosystem in our universities is a must for upscaling our universities to global standards. Concerted efforts need to be made by universities, ministries, and other apex bodies of higher education towards this. For instance, we are providing short-term certification courses on virtual reality, basic AI, etc., which has insured better employability for them.
Corporate Learning
Learning "on the job" or "via the work flow" is the right way to integrate upskilling into everyday work as a means of developing applicable skills. Industry-academia collaborations are the key to developing technical and discipline-specific skills, as they enable them to hone their knowledge and skills to grow professionally and personally. This kind of corporate learning will close or shorten the industry-academia skill gap. We have industry-designed and industry-specific courses that are best suited for students to learn from experts in their chosen field and improve their required and expected skill sets both in terms of technical and soft skills, and become more employable. These collaborations will pave the way for students to think of problem statements and find solutions to the problems by different means, thereby becoming innovators.
Entrepreneurship Education
Entrepreneurs are an inevitable part of a country’s economy. In an economic survey by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), 14,000 new startups came up during the fiscal year 2022. To create future entrepreneurs, imparting skills in entrepreneurship right now is important, and hence this will be one of the focus areas in skill development in the years to come. The Institutional Innovation Council, or E Cell, has been established at our institution and paves the way for start-ups and entrepreneurial thinking.
Life skills and Soft skills
Life skills and soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, attitudes, career attributes, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence quotients, among others, that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills.
Understanding the importance of this, we have continual soft skill training with certification for all our students.
It is appropriate that curricula continue to evolve, perhaps in radical ways, like by integrating competency-based education, where the required sets of technical skills are imparted in a structured way. Education needs to aim to do more than prepare young people for the world of work; it needs to equip students with the skills they need to become active, responsible, and engaged citizens, and upskilling is the only means to achieve these.
