Amit Bhatia is the founder & CEO of Aspire Human Capital Management, an industry-promoted social enterprise that offers embedded education for schools, colleges and universities with an aim to enhance employability & life skills. In an interaction with Vikram Chaudhary of The Financial Express, Bhatia shares how education that focuses on employability can help sustain the economic growth of the country. Excerpts:
Education needs to be linked to human supply chain, how can firms like Aspire help?
Since India turned 60 in 2007, she adopted an aggressive plan to skill 500 million youth projected to join the job market between 2007 and 2022, i.e. when India turns 75. Between the diamond and platinum jubilee of India?s liberty, lies the challenge of liberation of 500 million new job seekers and India?s demographic dividend. Aspire believes that skills development in India cannot wait for an evolution?we must seek a revolution that builds human talent supply chains across K-12 and higher education to employers. Since 2007, we are embedding ?employability education? inside schools, colleges and universities across India in partnership with global education leaders like iCarnegie, Harvard Business Publishing, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations, Edexcel and Babson.
How education that focuses on employability can help sustain the economic growth of the country?
Research shows that better education leads not only to higher individual income but is also a necessary (although not always sufficient) precondition for long-term economic growth. According to Krueger and Lindahl (2001): ?Each additional year of schooling appears to raise earnings by about 10% in the US, although the rate of return to education varies over time as well as across countries?. Therefore, education, with a special focus on employability, is critical to India sustaining its economic growth, especially inclusive economic growth. India?s education industry is expected to grow from $100 billion in 2012 to $300 billion in 2022 (Riel Miller and Carl Schoonover). This spending will be jointly led by Indian government (which currently spends only 4% of GDP on education compared to 5% by Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, the UK; 6% by the US; and 7.5% by Israel) and the private sector. If this mammoth $100 billion industry does not embed employability inside schools, colleges and universities urgently, India may potentially have a demographic disaster on hand. If we are successful, by 2050 India will grow per capita income from $1,000 to $20,000, GDP from $1 trillion to $40 trillion and become world?s second-richest economy, ahead of the US and behind China.
What is the scope of executive education in India?
Executive education refers to programmes offering continuous professional development of working adults, usually middle-level and senior-level executives, offered both by professional and academic education providers, which may lead to either a certification or even a degree. These can be general management programmes or specific to a sector (hospitality, healthcare, retail, etc) or specific to a practice area (quality management, project management, strategy & leadership, finance, etc). As the world becomes a greater knowledge economy, executive education will play a significant part in the lifelong learning processes of working adults, as not just an opportunity to upgrade skills, but an industry in itself.
