More corporates turning to Tier-2, 3 cities for sourcing talent, employment needs: NICS
Most of the major companies are searching for talent in the Tier-2 and 3 cities, and for this, they are running employability training programs. NICS is working with them to organize such programs in these cities.
NEW DELHI: In a major shift in their talent pool sourcing strategy, the big-time corporate entities have started to turn to tier 2 and 3 cities for employing youths.
For this, the blue-chip companies like Microsoft, TCS, and others are joining hands with the Ministry of Labour & Employment to jointly run online employability training programs and prepare youths of tier 2 cities and villages to make them employable.
This was disclosed by the R Ashwani Kumar, Joint Director, National Institute of Career Services (NICS) – an offshoot of the Ministry of Labour & Employment while addressing a huge number of college and university students and job-seekers during a webinar.
“Most of the major employers/ companies are looking for talent pool from Tier-2 and 3 cities. NICS is working with them to organize employability training programs in these cities and villages on their instance as they only have come forward proactively for it. They identify the colleges there and train the students for 200 hours from their 5th semester onwards up to the 8th semester, continuously. They only conduct the interviews as we facilitate them,” said Kumar.
“We have started online employability training programs, also called career skill training with TCS iON during the COVID period. Therefore more and more youths are being sourced from tier-2 cities. Any person having NICS ID can log in to our portal and access these programs for soft skills etc. We are in discussion with Microsoft too who have agreed to offer free training through their Microsoft Virtual Academy,” said Joint Director, NICS.
NICS has organized a series of job fairs like the ones we have done with Jeevitam weekly where employers like Hindustan Liver, Zomato, Big Basket participated. It was on March 25, the very first day of lockdown, NICS had launched an online job fair.
The webinar titled “Reimagining Campus Placements” was organized by Jeevitam – a tech-enabled livelihood platform, and Asian Community News (ACN) Network on Saturday. Hundreds of students from various colleges/universities across joined the webinar. It is a students-lead movement launched with the intent ‘Ab Har Student Banega Atmanirbhar’ – Now every student will become self-dependent in the field of finding a livelihood.
Kumar was responding to a question asked by Jeevitam’s Co-founder and Chief Happiness Officer – Munish Chawla. Chawla expressed concern over why placements are limited to the MBA, B. Tech courses.
“We want Reimagining Campus Placement to be a students’ movement and form student committees in all colleges/universities in every nook and corner of the country. We want students to use technology to reach out to the corporates and help their peer students to find work, and we act as enablers. That’s how it will become a movement. Today, students face a huge amount of challenge in finding work as the outside environment is not very supportive,” Chawla added
While addressing the students, Dr. Babu Lal, former Executive Director (Corporate Learning & Development), Human Resource Development Institute (HRDI), NOIDA of BHEL, and one of the panelists of the webinar, said that the this was the age of opportunities, as collaboration and co-creations held the key these days as they need more hands and minds working together to address the gaps society has and fortunately.
The youths are equipped with modern electronics gadgets. He cited an example of a school student who set up his startup Cyber Agents, and he has associates from engineering colleges including IITs, and it’s now a self-sustainable model as they are earning good revenues. Such kinds of opportunities this GIG and Tech-economy can create for the students.
Dr. Babu Lal who himself comes with a village background and faced many hardships during his early life span, said, “Many such startups attract interests from investors who approach them with seed capital and acquire the stake. Even during the COVID period a startup that is into drone designing etc provided internship to the students in Germany in the field of AI.
He said many MNCs were initially started in garages by the youths who had some great ideas and today their net worth is more than the net worth of many countries’ GDP. Therefore students should be changing their thinking from becoming job-seekers to job givers. There are ample opportunities in many sectors like hydro phony, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, digital marketing, AI, cybersecurity, and others.
Other panelists during the webinar included Madhura Dasgupta Sinha, Founder & CEO, Aspire For Her Foundation, Sanjeev K Ahuja, Editor, Foreign Affairs (Asia), Asian Community News (ACN) Network, and Mohinder Batra, former Head of National Sales, Godrej Tyson Foods Ltd,
In her address, Madhura Dasgupta Sinha said Inspire For Her was born on Women’s Day, and this startup was 5-month old and took off during the COVID period only.
“We started this venture as India’s biggest opportunity is actually are the women who are not working and if we are able to get these women in the age group of 18 and 25 years to work then there is almost a trillion-dollar opportunity realize. These women are very well educated as they went to schools and colleges. In India, more women graduate than men whereas the share of women in the total workforce is little more than 20 percent,” she said.
The key takeaways from the webinar included how to find suitable livelihood opportunities, to know how to create network, and grow a circle of Influence, to get a chance to interact with people from various sectors, and to find opportunities to become Social Entrepreneurs and Contribute.
