TeamLease has persistently focused on catalyzing the hands-on (skilled) jobs market. Our Thought Leadership initiative has consistently aimed at structuring this rather unorganized domain and shaping the policy and perception issues associated with the hands-on jobs industry over the past several decades.

This Thought leadership series will delve into comprehending the ‘Signaling Value’ of skills education, mapping candidate aspirations and occupational options and modeling their decisions related to choice of jobs, career advancements and migrations. The current edition deals with the perceptions candidates and their influence networks hold about skills education and hands-on jobs.

According to the report, only 2% of the workforce has opted for formal skill training making it one of the least preferred streams of education. The report attributes the low penetration of vocational learning to the lack of appreciation for hands-on training, limited upward mobility, weak labour market linkages and strong perception of labour as inferior which commands mere subsistent wages.

Further as per the report, apart from social standing, the current vocational education system has not been able to impress the employers either. Employers viewed vocational educated candidates to be marginally better than the untrained. In fact, most corporates were skeptical about the quality of training and hence provided the recruits with in-house training. They were also wary of trained candidates attiring within a short period.