[wheelguy]

Nikunj Sanghi, chairman of Automotive Skill Development Corporation(ASDC) speaks to Autocar professional. Must say, its an honest interview.

How can the blue-collared jobs remain relevant with the fast changing dynamics of the Indian automotive industry?
The entire auto industry has seen some disruptions in the past two years and is going to see a lot more disruptions in the next couple of years. A lot of them are because of the upcoming regulations in emissions and safety standards.

Disruptions in technology change a lot of jobs that exist today and also create new ones. Therefore, it is extremely important that the present workforce be relevant by either reskilling or upscaling themselves. The entire industry needs to collaborate towards the training of the blue-collared employees or else they would become irrelevant over the next five years.

In an interview with Autocar Professional two years ago, you had said: ‘ASDC’s goal is to fill the skill gap and to make unemployable people employable.’ What is the success rate since then?
It is not a very high success rate because we realised that there was a huge gap between industry expectations and what ASDC is doing. So if we look at just plain numbers, then in the last two years, ASDC has certified almost 350,000 people in various job categories starting from the manufacturing process and after sales and so on.

However, when we look at the employment data, we find that either we don’t have the employment data or even if we do, very few of the people who have got certified have got employed. This was an extremely rude shock for ASDC and when we started getting in touch with the industry in terms of why the industry has not been employing the people who have been certified by ASDC, which is an industry body, created by the industry, we found that there was a huge gap in what the industry expected out of the certification and what ASDC was doing.

What ASDC was doing was that it was concentrating on government-funded schemes and certifying candidates as required by the government within the framework. We were never expected to provide jobs but we were expected to make people employable. So, unless that was fulfilled, unless people were getting employed, obviously something was missing.

When we started engaging with each member of the industry to find out the gap we found that Maruti Suzuki India was doing a lot of training by itself, but was not looking at candidates who were certified by ASDC. So we engaged with Maruti, in fact, with very senior members of the company to became a part of the senior committee at ASDC so we would get direct feedback in terms of Maruti’s expectations.

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