Building Skills for Employability: Rozgar Project: British Council India

Session

Title:	Building Skills for Employability
Date and Time:	Thursday 19 November 2009 14.00-15.00 IST (GMT +4.5 hours)

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Abstract

India is facing a national skills deficit. Twelve million young people are leaving school each year without the vocational and life skills required for basic employment. The Indian National Skills Development Corporation is aiming for 500 million skilled Indians by 2022.

Project English, the British Council India’s regional training programme has partnered with a range of organizations including EGMM on projects aimed at improving the employability chances of millions of marginalized young people across India.

Manish Sabharwal, Meera Shenoy and Jill Coates will look at the current employment landscape and discuss how projects like EGMM’s Skills for Employability in Andhra Pradesh can exploit existing infrastructures to reach large numbers of young Indians facilitating entry into the workforce.

Speakers

Meera Shenoy	Meera Shenoy is Executive Director of EGMM, an Andhra Pradesh state government Mission, which she helped set up from scratch. Today, it has grown to become the largest Jobs mission for the underprivileged, globally. Its innovations are pro-poor products developed tailored to market needs like the countrys’ first grass root English, work readiness and computer Academies. She has given invited talk in national and international forums. The work featured recently in Knowledge@Wharton and the Wall Street Journal. Currently, she also works with the World Bank, as their expert in the field of Youth and employment, in Bihar, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Her previous work experience is corporate, and media, both print and television.
Manish Sabharwal	Manish is currently the Chairman and co-founder of Teamlease Services, India’s largest temporary staffing firm. The four year old firm now has over 80,000 employees in 770 cities/ towns across India. Earlier he co-founded India Life, an HR outsourcing company in 1996 that was acquired by Hewitt associates in 2002. Consequently he was Managing Director of Hewitt Outsourcing (Asia) in Singapore. Manish is a member of the Prime Ministers Council on Skill Development, served on the Planning Commission steering committee on labor and employment for the Eleventh five year plan (2007-12) and is a member of the CII core group on labor reforms. He also serves as an adviser on labour and employment issues to the State Governments of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Karnataka. He also writes regular columns for Financial Express, Economic Times and Business India on Labour market issues. Manish is an investor and board member of ICAP India (a joint venture with ICAP plc and India’s largest foreign exchange and fixed income brokerage), Gaja Capital (a private equity firm focused on the India’s domestic market) and India Insure (India’s largest institutional insurance brokerage firm). He got his MBA from The Wharton School and undergraduate degree in business from Shriram College, Delhi.
Jill Coates	Jill Coates is Head of Corporate Training at British Council, India. She has worked as a Language and Communications Skills trainer in Europe and Asia and has managed training programmes for Siemens and the German Arbeitsamt. She spent five years as a consultant for a European Social Fund project to up-skill the workforce in the former GDR, as part of a government strategy to attract new industry to the region. She joined the British Council, Sri Lanka, in 2004 to work on a two-year project with HSBC to create an integrated Language and Communication development programme for offshore contact centres throughout South and East Asia. Jill led on the development of a language assessment test for recruitment. Jill is currently managing a partner project with Microsoft which aims to improve the employability skills of rural youth across India.