Employability of Vocational Education and Training Graduates

Abstract

The demand in the Indian labour market for skilled workers and the current focus of the newline Indian government on skill development requires vocational education and training (VET) newline institutes to produce highly employable graduates. Consequently, India is going through a newline skilling revolution towards providing superior quality formal skill training to 400 million newline people by the year 2022 and the major providers of VET, the Industrial Training Institutes newline (ITIs), are receiving a great deal of attention at the national level. newline Literature regarding the ITIs has focussed chiefly on issues like the student retention, newline employment rates and employability skills. However, there are no empirical studies which newline critically evaluate the nature of the employability of ITI students. This lack of research goes newline to show why the employability of ITI students has been persistently low, despite several newline initiatives and reforms on the part of the government. newline The present study attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by providing an in depth newline investigation of the employability of ITI students- its components and the factors affecting it. newline The study applies a mixed methods approach to analyse data collected from a sample of 330 newline respondents including students, instructors, staff members and employers associated with the newline government ITIs in the city and suburban area of Mumbai. The first set of findings show the newline career paths pursued by these students and the nature of support provided by the ITIs to the newline students as they pursue these paths. Additionally, this study provides a detailed review of the newline literature on studies measuring employability and also develops a scoring scheme to grade the newline employability of ITI students in this context. This scoring scheme is used to develop an newline employability profile of the ITI respondents in the study. A thorough statistical analysis of newline the relation between various factors and the level of employability of the ITI students is newline presented. This is followed by a qualitative presentation of the factors by which the institutes newline affect the newline xiiemployability of the students. Finally, the study presents an empirical employability newline framework for Indian vocational education and training students. The study concludes with a newline discussion of the implications and recommendations for various stakeholders of the Indian newline VET system. This study will provide valuable insights for researchers, planners, policy newline makers, educators and the industry associated with the VET system in India. Eventually, it newline will lend new directions towards utilizing the capacity of the youth pursuing vocational newline training courses for the economic benefit of themselves and the nation. newline