Business model for a non-profit training institute to bridge the talent gap of growing India

Abstract

India is growing at a rapid pace and going by various reports and projections it is destined to become one of the top economies in the world. But there are several challenges along the path and one of the most evident and critical one is the shortage of skilled manpower to fuel the growth. We have a good number of qualified graduates, but their 'employability' is questionable. Experts opine that vocational training would solve this problem of skill-set mismatch between industry and education. There are various vocational institutes in the social sector and industries and they have been doing good work towards rural employability. We looked into various existing models like Vigyan Ashram, Byrraju Foundation -Gram IT, CAP Foundation, Ashok Rao's initiative, Ashanet, etc and found that each of them have valuable take-away. Based on our study of various models and talking to people who are associated to this industry, we have proposed a replicable model for the vocational training institute The following are the key findings and recommendations that we have made in our Business Model Courses offered to students need to be designed only according to the market needs. Strong linkage with the Industry has to be established. Short-term courses are more effective than long term ones. Location of the institute should be near to the target students. The social angle should drive the vision, mission and strategy of the institute but the operations should be run for-profit. Quality and Competency of the faculty is very critical. Should leverage Social/NGO networks and Technology (lCT) to access the teaching resources. Sponsors and funds should be managed transparently and periodic status reports are mandatory for credibility. Students will be provided financial assistance towards the fee with recovery could be direct or indirect, explicit or inexplicit. From the point of sustainability and scalability, a logical extension to this model would be to look at Sponsor Dedicated Centers (SOC), which could be positioned as an outsourced partner to the Companies in the space of Recruitment and Training. The target employment sector should be a mix of Urban and Rural. Hence Entrepreneurship should be an important course stream. Finally we have worked out the details of a Sample Pilot Center to be setup and provided the financial projections for the same.