Work culture today is experiencing a gradual transformation; be it globalization, demographic change, or most importantly, technology. With digital transformation happening at an unprecedented rate, businesses have started to adapt to the latest technological advancements and keep up with the digitization trends. The rate of change in the next decade will thus be uncompromising and rapid.

ASMA Thought Leadership Forum 2021, powered by Suryadatta Group Of Institutes on ‘Future of Jobs in Next Decade‘ on 6th October 2021 was a power-packed event that witnessed discussions on how influential innovation in technology has impacted the future of work.

The notable speakers of the event were Rajive Kumar, Member Secretary of All India Council For Technical Education, Bhupesh Daheria, the Managing Trustee of Aegis Knowledge Trust, Sanjay Chordiya, Founder President and Chairman, Suryadatta Group of Institutes, Ranendra Saha, Ex Vice-Chancellor, BITS Pilani, and Pradeep Pandey, the Director of Learning & Development Academy, Grant Thornton Bharat LLP.

The keynote speaker of the event was Mr. Rajive Kumar, who is the Member Secretary of All India Council For Technical Education. In this insightful discussion, Rajive Kumar talks about how they worked on the AICTE level as per the future job skills and industry demand is concerned. AICTE build a perspective plan for future education where the committee identified the thrust areas.

He further added that they requested the committee to prepare a long-term perspective plan. The committee said that preparing a long-term perspective plan won’t work because of the ever-evolving technologies. Therefore, they submitted the medium and short-term prospective plan for technical education, where they identified 9 crucial skills. These skills included AI, ML, 3D printing, data science, robotics, quantum computing, and lots more.

Thus, embedding these skills in the current courses became the immediate task of the AICTE. Soon, approval to colleges working on the traditional areas was stopped. The approval was only given to the colleges that are working on the thrust areas. However, the main issue was not giving approvals but finding educators who will be able to teach these key skills. Therefore, AICTE had to integrate industry and academia, and train faculty for these key skills.

Thus, offline faculty training programs were immediately started, but there were inherent challenges as training almost 6 lakhs teachers offline was indeed tough. But with the pandemic, they shifted to online mode of teaching. The outcome of the online teaching was tremendous as these faculty training programs were conducted by reputed institutes like IITs. AICTE was successfully able to train our teachers with more than 1000 programs.

On the AICTE portal, ample internship opportunities were opened up for the students. Various government ministries and industries are also providing internships through the AICTE portal. This is where our youths are able to take part in the government’s decision-making process.

Kumar then further said that they were thereby able to give their interns exposure to all the areas. Although they have come up with a model curriculum, but they have to tweak it as per the availability of expertise in that area.

The discussion was then joined by Bhupesh Daheria, who is the Managing Trustee of Aegis Knowledge Trust. As per his views, it is extremely difficult to predict the future. Last year, there was chaos within the people that how they would plan everything in the future. People didn’t have that visibility of 6 months or 1 year, but only have plans for the next 24 hours.

Now, Mr. Sanjay Chordiya, the Founder President and Chairman, Suryadatta Group of Institutes, enters the discussion and says that today, if someone needs to grab all kinds of opportunities in the job market, along with the commerce, management, science, students; every sector should also be equally equipped. We have to bring everybody together and work in an environment which should be just technical specifications.

The conversation is continued by Ranendra Saha, who has remained the Ex Vice-Chancellor, of BITS Pilani. As per his views, today if we move on to discuss what will happen to employability, then within one year it may drastically change to something. The whole employability is going to be based on technology, as different kinds of technology are emerging in our lives and we need to prepare our students for that.

Lastly, Pradeep Pandey, the Director of Learning & Development Academy, Grant Thornton Bharat LLP brings in the concept of technological advancements like Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning. He says that AI and ML are some of the top subjects that are being taught today in most tech colleges. These are the basics that make the students ready for their future jobs. He feels that students from all the domains should have the basic training of tech.

Nevertheless, in the next 10 years, we will be experiencing a radical transformation in the field of both education and jobs where technology will completely take over the need for human intellect and skill. This will help to boost the potential in humans for creating a more profitable, and equitable world of work.