BSmart HR Conclave: Need to make internship scheme mandatory, say experts

Automation, AI, and digitisation are not limited to a particular sector and while jobs have evolved, skillsets haven't

Mandating India Inc to comply with the Centre’s new internship scheme, which aims to skill 10 million youngsters in five years, may lead to better results, said human resources (HR) experts on Wednesday.

Speaking at Business Standard’s BSmart HR Conclave on ‘Shaping Tomorrow’s Workforce’, senior executives from the industry and academia said that the scheme’s success, which was currently voluntary, depended on the execution.

They also said that a monitoring mechanism was required to map the learning progress made by interns.

The session saw Amit Das, country HR leader, and board member, Novo Nordisk India; Suryanarayan G Iyer, head, human capital management, cloud solution engineering team, Oracle India; Ruhie Pande, group chief HR officer, Sterlite Power; and Hema Bajaj, head, faculty, MBA-HR, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) discuss the interplay between jobs and skills.

 

Terming the internship scheme a “great intention” on the part of the government, Das said “mandate always works better in India” and it would be a good idea to make the scheme mandatory.

In her Budget speech last month, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) would collaborate with the top 500 companies to channel resources towards industrial skills training.

Under the scheme, interns would receive a monthly stipend of Rs 5,000 and a one-time assistance of Rs 6,000. The companies would cover the cost of training these interns through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) fund. Unlike apprenticeship programmes, companies will not be obligated to offer permanent positions to interns.

On Wednesday, the panelists concurred that the programme was a “great idea at a mammoth level”, adding that humans could differentiate themselves from machines by learning the skills of the future: Art of judgement and contextualisation.  The challenge was to create a mechanism to monitor the progress in skilling.

“While the government mandate is a great idea, the government should be monitoring the performance of the students. Organisations, too, need to create meaningful projects for students to participate so that they learn skills which they can apply in future. Contingent on these, this mandate is a great initiative,” Pande said.

The duration of the training was another point of discussion with a consensus on keeping it at least 6-8 weeks to ensure a “meaningful” impact.

Stressing on the importance of “application of concepts” and “field-based learning”, Bajaj said that internships were “extremely important from a skill-building perspective”.

Equipping her students with certain skills before they go for their internships enabled them to maximise the value derived, she said.

Skill gap 

India was currently battling a major skill shortage that accentuated the problem of employability.

“India has a skill shortage of 56 per cent. This is a very interesting paradox – the unemployment rate is 6-7 per cent, and at the same time 20 per cent of those qualified are unemployed,” Das pointed out. Among those who were illiterate, the unemployment rate stood at 0.5 per cent, while 1.46 per cent of those who had studied up to the fourth standard were without jobs. But the unemployment rate among graduates was as high as 18-20 per cent, she said.

This lead to a certain dichotomy with “lakhs applying for a certain few thousand jobs” — not only white collar, but also blue-collar ones in, say manufacturing — against a dearth of manpower in others.

Bajaj explained that this was because jobs had evolved with technological progress, and the skill sets required for these jobs had also changed. “Automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and digitisation are not limited to a particular sector or domain. While jobs have evolved, the skill sets have not,” she added.

Pande explained this through an example from her own sector – power. She said her company couldn’t find any institute that offered a course producing ready-to-hire talent for renewable energy operations.

Around 40 million people in India worked in the organised sector. About 21.4 million of this was in the government sector, with the private sector employing the rest. The panelists said that India had time until 2040 to make the most of its demographic dividend.

Tech power 

There is no option but to adopt tech. “Machines are also learning, and becoming better,” said Das.

The HR experts have thus started using AI in the HR processes. For example, Pande said: “AI has made our life easy and the younger generation is very comfortable with it. As HR, we can leverage AI by using it (through chatbots and other means) to identify disengaged groups and see what can be done.”

In multigenerational and more diverse teams (that include differently abled people, the third gender, or people with different sexual orientations), being adept with technological advances was critical for HR functions.

And when it came to best practices, India was not far behind.

Bajaj said that best practices, which may be available to a select population, needed to be taken to a wider population across different levels of education. 

“We need to focus on application [of theoretical concepts] right from our school education system where we see that curriculums of various boards are more about learning concepts,” she said. This was now changing with several international education boards entering the scene.

“We can see re-invention happening in the last few years – one such major change is to not only understand concepts but also apply them to real-life problems, real life challenges and opportunities,” Bajaj said.

Another major area was driving students towards real-life challenges, with a focus on field-based learning.

Pande, too, said that application-based learning was extremely important to ensure an industry ready workforce. “From my experience, I can tell that I did a lot of rote learning. Application-based learning is extremely essential, which includes students going out on the field for 4 to 6 weeks,” she added.

Institutions are also moving to adapt to these new needs.

Bajaj, for example, said that NMIMS was working on building an AI policy. “Students will use AI no matter what. They will go to ChatGPT. It’s also a good thing — why not take advantage of technology like this. So we are framing a policy of what all the students can use and in what way,” she said.

Institutions are increasingly bringing in professors of practice who are industry veterans capable of identifying industry projects where students can be engaged as interns.

Professors and teachers also need to spend time doing internship, they said, which will allow them first-hand experience in preparing their students better for the workplace.

This two-way exchange was indeed gathering pace as Das pointed out that recently a Delhi-based institute sent one of their professors teaching business analytics to their company to work for six months. 

While the academician helped Novo Nordisk with his domain knowledge, he also took first-hand industry experience to the classroom.