Abstract
‘Human Capital’ is considered to be the greatest resource of a nation. The major components among the two are health and education. Nowadays, mere formal education is failing to serve the purpose where there exists a gap between pursued knowledge and employment market requirements. Here comes the role of skill development programmes in the blurring of this gap. ASAP Kerala is a joint initiative of the General Education and Higher Education Departments, Government of Kerala. This initiative offers a wide variety of skill development courses in many areas such as accounting, banking and finance, fashion designing, global business process outsourcing, printing technology, emergency medical care, editing floriculturist-protected Cultivation and so on. Each course has language training with the object of building up the LSRW skills of the enrolled candidate as well as the skill programme. Each batch from a college will be guided by a Skill Development Executive (SDE) appointed by the ASAP Directorate. After the formal programme, a hands-on internship of three months is offered to the enrolled candidate to give them industry experience. The language skill package is administered by the British Council. One of the major social evils found in the Higher Education system nowadays is ‘educated unemployed’. The root cause for this issue is the inability to meet the demand of the employment market requirements. Formal education finds no link with the job specifications. Here arises the need for acquiring the necessary skills to cope with the demands of the job market. Hence, imparting such skills through some structured agency becomes inevitable. Here comes the role of ASAP Kerala to overwhelm such issues and eventually blur the gap.
Keywords: ASAP, skill equipment, human capital stock.
References
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