By Rachit Jain, CEO of Youth4work
India has the second largest population of this planet, ranked third in the annual World GDP contribution and soon it would become the 5th largest economy in the world. With so many advancements taking place, still, almost a quarter of the working population is in extreme or moderate poverty. Also, by 2019, India will have 18.9 million unemployed people. Now, this is a serious issue, the jobs scenario in India is worrying.
Statically speaking, the real jobs markets of India are few and the No. 1 spot is taken by Bangalore with its 2 million IT professionals racing to overtake Silicon Valley by 2020. Next comes Gurugram, which has emerged in the last few years as a name for providing jobs and its proximity to Delhi makes it a perfect choice for the job seekers.
Then comes the Bollywood city Mumbai, which is also regarded as the commercial capital of India and being a port city, it has a variety of jobs in Logistics, IT, healthcare etc.
The last but not the least, Delhi, the national capital which is one of the finest locations where one can look for jobs. This is also an extremely-important economic center for India with 1.5 lakh professionals working here are from states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and NRC regions. But these so-called “job markets” have become extremely crowded and the scope for future employment looks bleak.
Nonetheless, India is a booming economy which recently managed to surpass the estimated 6.6 % growth for the full fiscal year 2018 and its gross domestic product grew at 7.7% in the fourth quarter. As per the findings of the Economic Survey, India has become the fastest growing economy in the world by leaving China behind in the race.
The reason could be the tremendous growth in key sectors like
• Infrastructure, “Make in India” initiative,
• Financial Services, mobile payment system in rural India,
• Technology, online population of 462 million plus users,
• Automotive, government’s 10-year Automotive Mission Plan and
• Healthcare with the expectations of India becoming a $280 billionmarket by 2020.
Although these statistics are impressive and suggestive but India’s Job Market stays stagnant with employment rate falling to 5.29 % in May from 5.64 % in April 2018. There is a job crisis in spite of India growing fastest in the world as an economy.
With this much growth potential and opportunities, what could be the reason for this everlasting unemployment and people still not getting 3 meals a day?
One reason is that the “Economy is generating less jobs per unit of GDP”, that is, more work is now being done with fewer employees.
Another reason is that a lot of the jobs that are being created are of poor quality despite strong economic growth and some 77% of workers in India will have vulnerable employment by 2019 and while the overall unemployment rate hovered between 3.4% to 3.5% in the years 2017-19, the unemployment rate in the age group of 15-24 years is much higher, which is expected to increase further from 10% in 2014 to 10.7% in 2019. In 2017, the unemployment rate in the 15-24 age group was 10.5%.
So, where are those millions of jobs that were supposed to be created according to the stats? The obvious reason for this high unemployment rate specifically among youth is that the young and bright of our country are not as prepared as they should be. Most of the youngsters make the mistake of choosing a degree over skill and suffer the consequences later.
That is where Youth4work comes into play, an exciting and innovative talent development initiative with a vision – To be the preferred personal space for every aspiring youngster in terms of self-assessment, self-introspection, and improvement of their skills is the motto of this youth-centric organization.
The user communities here span across domains like IT, Engineering, Sales & Marketing, Finance, Retail, HR, Design & Creativity, Skill Development verticals, PMKVY and many more. Intelligent assessment and global ranking algorithms help users to ‘identify and showcase’ their talents whereby a variety of skill courses and competitive practice materials help the youth acquire job specific-skills, improve their rankings and become employable.