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Indian Education Matching Steps with a Dynamic Industry- 19-Apr-2016
With the advent of the new financial year & the initiatives undertaken by the government in the Union budget, the coming year promises to be quite an eventful one for the Indian education sector.
Digital education has opened up a host of opportunities for the youth population & correctly tackling the challenges hampering the adoption of this platform can successfully tap into the huge potential for the Indian youth. Digitization has impacted growth across industrial sectors & fostered employment.
The Indian banking sector which is a sunshine sector, is currently witnessing unprecedented growth. With RBI giving licenses to new banks and vigorous expansion plans of existing network of banks to banking services being offered through digital platforms to reach even the remotest of consumers, the sector is certainly gaining a lot of traction and hence is proving to be a lucrative career option for many. The public sector banks in India employ approximately seven lakh people out of which a large percentage of the current employees belong to the retirement age bracket. This gap is expected to further increase due to the efforts being made by the RBI and the Government to expand financial services into rural areas which will require participation from the private sector leading to increase in recruitments to fulfil the manpower requirements. This translates into an opportunity for about 5 million students who graduate every year in India.
All of these students need skill based training & grooming to increase their chances of being absorbed by banks. What makes banking jobs an attractive proposition for these students is the working trends in banks that has witnessed a paradigm shift over the last one and a half decades. Owing to the digital technology era, bank employees no longer have to update ledgers, passbooks, make payments or accept deposits manually. Banks now want their key employees to concentrate on relationship building with their customers, where they get into advisory role of understanding the customers financial need and providing solutions accordingly. These activities also help in generating commission income for the banks; hence there is a demand for trained manpower with adequate knowledge of investment products and financial mathematics. For such candidates, the remuneration is not a constraint.
The advent & widespread use of digital platforms has also increased the demand for business analysts or data analysts across sectors. In fact this industry need is clearly demonstrated by Harvard Business Review tagging Data Scientist as the Sexiest job of 21st century. However, there still continues to be a mismatch in the demand and supply conditions. According to McKinsey Global Institute By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions. A data scientist must be equipped with the knowledge of statistics and programming along with sharp business acumen. This is a career that witnesses an amalgamation of art and science in a fascinating manner. Therefore, it is mandatory for a data scientist to possess logical thinking capabilities with a strong hold on the fundamental techniques along with an out of the box thinking to innovate and provide creative solutions for the business problems.
Today, almost all companies across industries and verticals are adopting analytics as one of the important business functions. Be it BFSI where credit risk modelling, risk analytics, churn analytics are a typical data science practices or e-commerce/retail/CPG where consumer analytics, marketing analytics, supply chain analytics, pricing analytics, social media and web analytics dominates or be it telecommunication where customer profiling, new product analytics, product analytics are being tried more often to name a few.
In response to this demand, several institutes and universities have started programs especially designed for data science aiming towards different target audience based on their prior qualifications and work experience. Training institutes conduct skill intensive courses that focus on concepts and their practical application with an interface of the job relevant tools such as R or SAS. Moreover, these institutes connect with the industry experts and provide ample exposure to the participants to the extent that the courses are conducted by the professionals who possess the relevant subject expertise from diverse verticals and industries.
To effectively channelize the potential of the Indian youth & ensure employability through correct fitment in roles evolving through dynamic changes in Industry nationwide as well as globally, the wide-scale creative use of digital learning technology is the need of the day.
