TeamLease Services flagship apprenticeship program, NETAP completes training for 1.3 lakh candidates since its inception in 2014
National, 16th January 2018
: National Employment through Apprenticeship Program [NETAP], a flagship apprenticeship program of TeamLease Skills University, has reached new milestones by cumulatively enrolling and training about 1.3 lakh candidates pan India. In addition to this the program has certified and placed about 40% of the enrolled trainees into formal employment across industries. Adoption has increased across all sectors, with maximum growth seen in the manufacturing segment (about 12%), followed by 10% growth in retail, 8% growth in logistics & supply chain management and 5% growth in BFSI. This stands tall as a testament as compared to the various other initiatives like trade apprenticeships (RDAT) and graduate and technician apprenticeship program (BOAT).
Commenting on the growth trajectory of NETAP, Mr. Sumit Kumar, Vice President – NETAP, TeamLease Services, said, “NETAP has been instrumental part of the overall growth of apprenticeships in India owing to its to its architecture of public private partnership built on the foundation of legal compliance under NEEM guidelines notified by MHRD. Moreover few other reasons that have contributed to our growth are strong infrastructure to address scale; industry connect to generate awareness and demand for apprenticeships; blended training process focusing on desired output of productivity and robust execution mechanism to support employers.”
The benchmarking of stipend to minimum wages unlike as in graduate apprenticeship training is another contributor to the growth and acceptance of NETAP amongst the youth. The growth of apprenticeship has been pan India and few states where the potential has been growing consistently are Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. Some of the sectors where apprenticeships will continue to grow in 2019 are Manufacturing, Retail, BFSI, Logistics, IT & Networking, Tourism & Hospitality as these sectors are the highest contributors to India’s GDP and therefore will require the availability of a vast skilled work pool.
Though education and skill development has been a core focus of the government where in many structural reforms have been initiated to augment the growth of the sector; however there are still many areas that need targeted focus from all stakeholders. Further elaborating on the key reforms required, Mr. Kumar added, “NETAP has a potential to scale much more and grow at a faster pace if the program gets a nod from UGC to have higher education connectivity. In addition to this, the Department of Higher Education (DoHE) needs to recognize learning under apprenticeships and also introduce a credit framework based on NSQF to link it with higher education. All this holistically along with work based learning (in collaboration between MHRD & MSDE) will help address India’s un-employability issue and lead to continual growth of NETAP and the apprenticeship model in India.”
India has a strong potential to have a pool of largest number of apprentices in the world surpassing China which today has 47% of its workforce equipped with high skill sets and has wages which are far more competitive than India. Not far from this are countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea with 74%, 80% and 96% of their workforce with high skill sets. Unfortunately India has only 3.5% of its workforce have skills of any sort and just about 5 lakh apprentices despite having a formal ACT since 1961. There is lot of growth potential that is still unexplored and more positivity is expected in 2019. Employers have become more accepting about apprentices and proactively hiring from among apprenticeship increasingly. Moreover the perception amongst candidates has also improved over the course of years.
There is major expectation from the Union Budget 2019 to address the multiple aspects of apprenticeship, training, skilling and vocational education. All of this will make the eco-system more lucrative to both employers and candidates.
