Hyderabad, 9 November, 2016: India Skills Report 2017 – a joint initiative by PeopleStrong, a leading HR solutions and HR Technology company from India, and Wheebox, a Global Talent Assessment Company, in collaboration with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), was launched by Hon’ble Union Minister of Labour Shri. Bandaru Dattatreya at CII’s Global Skills Summit in Hyderabad today.
India Skills Report 2017, in its fourth season, captures insights from the largest employability test that was spread out to 3000 educational campuses, assessing five lakh students across 29 states and seven union territories from noteworthy educational universities and professional institutes in the country along with the India’s hiring intent survey that reached out to over 125+ employers across 11 major sectors.
According to the study, employability amongst the talent pool joining the workforce every year is increasing significantly. While in 2014 the percentage of employable population was at 33%, it has increased significantly to 40% this year. This is a decent increase considering that all the initiatives in this space are yet at a very nascent stage.
The report also shared that the female candidates seem to be more employable than their male counterparts. “Employability” here does not include only domain excellence but also takes into consideration other aspects like communication skills, logical and analytical ability and several other aspects.
India Skills Report 2017 is backed by various other renowned partners like LinkedIn, United Nations Development Programme, AICTE, AIU and various state governments.
From the demand side, the study forecasts an overall increase of about 7-10% in the hiring intent for year 2017 when compared to the current year. Despite the kind of turbulence which is shaking the global market, it is a very good sign to see a moderate increase in hiring in the coming year. Though at an overall level, almost all sectors except Telecom (which expects high growth in hiring) expect a steady or moderate growth. For example, allied sectors in telecom, auto ancillary, quick service restaurants, and power and energy management are expected to lead the growth in hiring. This brings good news to the candidates who are on a look out for job opportunities.
Year 2016 under the Modi Government has seen lot of initiatives in the space of skilling, job creation and most importantly in terms to linking skilling to jobs. The Government has taken steps to bridge the gap between talent supply and demand. While it is too early to predict the results of these initiatives, this focus from the top is showing some early positive signs. At least the results from India Skills Report 2017, one of the most comprehensive reports that provides a consolidated view of the talent landscape of India suggest so.
The report also shares that Maharashtra as a state will not only have the highest percentage of employable workforce but it will also see high frequency in hiring in the coming year. However, when it comes to the preferred places to work, Bangalore seems to be the preference for the talent pool, which will start joining the workforce shortly.
The report also tried to identify the preferred sourcing channels of the employers. For the fourth consecutive year Internal referrals came across the most preferred sourcing channels. Though both traditional channels (job boards, consultants) and new channels (digital channels) are picking up pace every year, internal referral because of their cost and quality benefits are shadowing all other channels. In addition to this the report this year had special focus on the current state of gender diversity in organizations across sectors and the initiatives employers are taking to improve this number. According to the study, though the gender diversity in almost all sectors has still not touched the number of 33%; not many organizations are looking to resolve this issue right at the source. Only 40% of the employers who participated in India Hiring Intent survey, have defined targets to hire women candidates. And even in organizations where this number is right there on the KPI charts the target ranges from 10-40% (depending on the industry and the kind of work).
Mr. Pankaj Bansal, Co-founder and CEO of PeopleStrong, said” It feels great to see yet another version of India Skills Report. The results look positive despite the turbulence in global markets, and this surely reinstates the belief that the time of India is here and we are moving in the right direction. It is especially interesting to see a positive hiring intent for the third consecutive year, and also the focus that is expected to increase towards women hiring and entry-mid level jobs. With jobs at the center of every skilling and employability related initiative I am sure that results will improve and with each year we will see the impact of matchmaking initiatives which have started “.
Shri Bandaru Dattatreya, Hon’ble Union Minister of Labour said, “Government is focussed on employment generation which can be enabled through Make in India and Skill India. India must become the skill capital of the world. Skilling isn’t only a government agenda. It cannot be done without industry partnering and investing in training.
Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, Confederation of Indian Industry said “CII is proud to be a partner to the India Skills Report 2017. The report, now in its 4th edition, is a joint initiative to address the common goal of quantitatively analyzing the mismatch of jobs and skilled workforce across India. The report is consistently quoted by Industry & Government across forums in India and this is the real testament of its success. I congratulate the ISR team for providing the Industry with such comprehensive data of the supply side, that directly helps Industry to hire skilled youth across domains”.
Mr. Nirmal Singh, Founder and CEO of Wheebox said” If we look at the current stock of the Skill landscape in India, the situation is alarming. As per India Skills Report 2017, we found out that of all the students entering the job market across the country, hardly 2 out of 5 meet the criteria of the employment set by the employers. The severity of the situation is accentuated by many levels when the economy is looking up, new jobs are getting generated in ecommerce, energy, retail, telecom, hospitality and financial industry; but there are not enough “skilled” people available. Many jobs are getting mechanized and can be managed by a few people and intelligent algorithms then we are heading to a large challenge where many of us do not know the unknown future. We may have plenty of low to moderately skilled people for jobs that may not exist in future”.
“The need of the hour is to evangelize the large challenge that is just round the corner. All countries experience demographic dividend once in their lifetime and India’s demographic dividend is just an opportunity for next 25 years, Once gone it will never
come again. Though we are late in identifying the opportunity still if we do not prepare ourselves rapidly to reap the benefits” said Nirmal Singh.
About PeopleStrong:
PeopleStrong is India’s leading human resource (HR) solutions and HR Technology Company, enriching experience of over 175+ corporate customers and over 500,000 users. With the vision to simplify work life, PeopleStrong delivers its technology and services in one offering, using its on-demand technology product PeopleStrong Alt, which has distilled tens of thousands of hours of ‘natural research and development (R&D) — a decade long experience of servicing the HR functions of top Indian companies. Known for its penchant to innovate, PeopleStrong has many firsts to its name, the recent one being India’s first native HR App for smartphones that aims to transform the future of work and work life in the HR world. PeopleStrong is the first company in the space to be successfully assessed on SSAE16.
For more information: Log onto: www.peoplestrong.com/
About Wheebox:
Wheebox is India’s leading online talent assessment Company that partners’ corporations for finding and retaining best talent using validated, reliable and standardized test for pre-hiring and learning needs assessments. Wheebox benchmarks over 2 million users annually across users globally. Staying aligned to the vision of Wheebox to “Measure World’s Talent”, it partners over 5000 higher and vocational education campuses for conducting its proprietary “Wheebox Employability Skill Test” for final year graduates to benchmark competencies that matter the most for being employable in corporations. Wheebox partners many fortune 500 corporations and hundreds of small and medium enterprises to power their hiring and competency development assessment needs
globally. Wheebox also powers “India Skills Report” skill supply side study and complements thousands of colleges to identify, benchmark and spot areas of competencies and supplementing with Institution wide and candidate report for developing competencies for employment by partnering Confederation of Indian Industry, PeopleStrong, LinkedIn, Association of Indian Universities, United Nations Development Program and All India Council for Technical Education. Wheebox also partners many Indian states to design and deploy State Skills Report and Ministry of Labor and Employment with its proprietary BARO Career Interest Report for suggesting careers to candidates across Model Career Centers in India.
For more information: Log onto: www.wheebox.com
About Linkedin:
LinkedIn connects the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful and transforms the ways companies hire, market and sell. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce through ongoing development of the world’s first Economic Graph. LinkedIn has more than 400 million members and has offices around the world.
For securing a copy of complete report or accessing the pool of talent please visit www.peoplestrong.com , www.wheebox.com or www.IndiaSkillsReport.com
For further information, please contact:
Pashyanti Shukla/ Neha Singh
+91-9654268426 / 9910638881
pashyanti.shukla@adfactorspr.com/ neha.singh@adfactorspr.com
