| |9 May 2019HIGHERReviewrate.B Suresh, Chief Sales Officer, Naukri.com, says that irrespective of the market scenario, `good talent' is always in demand and in short sup-ply, niche job skills are needed across the sector.It's a real paradoxical situation for the India, as a nation, where at one end we are churning out huge numbers of STEM graduates looking for jobs and at the other end indus-tries and corporates are struggling to get the skilled manpower. This is the biggest bottleneck in trans-muting demographic dividend into economic dividend.India's demographic dividend appears to be very conducive for Startup entrepreneurs. India as the youngest nation in the world and its enormous population offers one of the largest consumer base in the world. It offers unlimited opportunities for every unique need of every segment of population. Its infrastructure, education, healthcare, banking, finance, insurance, traffic, cleanliness drive etc are in dire need of up gradation and offers unlimited opportunities for the start-ups to create a difference. As per the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor(GEM) survey only five per cent of the country's people go on to establish their own businesses which is among the lowest in the world, where as the business discontinuation rate is among the highest at 26.4 percent. According to the Randstad Work monitor survey around 76 per cent of the workforce of India wants to work with start-ups. However, more people are coming forward to establish their start-ups every year but the success rate, as per oxford economics report, is only about 10% and most of them fail because of lack of innovation. Thus, as a country we face dual challenge. At the producer end, we have a huge task to bridge the skill gap and make the people job ready;and at the consumer end,we need to create more jobs to employ the youths. Dig-itization and emerging technologies are fast changing markets for existing industries, creating new opportuni-ties for entrepreneurs and replacing-job roles with new skills and mind-set. I feel that our education system has failed miserably to keep pace with the shifting global market landscape. General observation and a bitter fact is that our universities are not prepar-ing the students properly to fill these roles because they are still educating the graduates in the same manner as-they were doing since years. I firmly believe that education, and especially the STEM Education, is the key to economic development and sustainable growth of any Nation. However, looking at the technologi-cal innovations, global scenario and demography of the country - India as a nation should emphasize more on the development of skills and entre-preneurial mind-set. Industry based skill development and entrepreneur-ship should formally be included in the university curriculum and given due weightage and importance. It is need of the hour to add another S (Skills) and E (Entrepreneurship) to the education system and make a par-adigm shift from STEM to SSTEEM ­ Science, Skills, Technology, Engi-neering, Entrepreneurship and Math-ematics. If we want to prepare our graduates for the jobs of the future and foster the next generation of in-novative entrepreneurs, we must have a strong will power and courage to reinvent and transform our education system from STEM to SSTEEM.It's high time that all the stake-holders, namely, industries, govern-ment and academia work together to reshape our higher education system so that it produces graduates with the right skills and right kind of entre-preneurial mind-set who can contrib-ute and fuel the economic growth of the nation.Ashok BhansaliIndia as a nation should emphasize more on the development of skills and entrepreneurial mind-set
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