Skills Ministry banks on India Inc to help in apprenticeship

Having made its apprenticeship law more employer friendly, the ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship is banking on the industry to impart apprenticeship training to the youth under its flagship National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS).

The idea is to encourage companies make use of the flexibilities and fiscal support being provided by the government under the NAPS to induct more youth for apprenticeship training, certification, and brand the initiative.

“We are moving towards self-regulation wherein industry can develop its own curriculum based on its requirement for training, do the certification so that they [youth] become employable, and hire them eventually if needed,” said skills development secretary KP Krishnan, who was speaking at the Economic Times India Leadership Council meet on Friday.

Krishnan said that skilled personnel in India still do not command the wage premium because of the weak training system in the country. “Apprenticeship is the formal design through which industry can pick the youth and decide how it wants to train workers for their needs,” he said, adding that this could fetch the workers a wage premium over others.

The government reckons that undertaking apprenticeship programme in a big way would help the industry as the rate of return is higher with short payback period, there’s no obligation to hire apprentices as workers, the attrition rate is less in this case and the companies save on the cost of recruitment if they decide to hire their own-trained apprentices as workers.

ILC members have agreed to take a pledge to become brand ambassadors of NAPS by undertaking the programme in their industry.