kill sets are always looked at as a means to progress and succeed in anyone’s professional life;however, what is often under looked is the importance of overall-exposure in life. Exposure to life-experiences, career options and education streams at a very early stage of life plays a much important role in anyone’s professional life. Youth of this generation is often heard saying that the competition is much tougher nowadays.

What are the skill sets required for the youth in country to be employable?

On the other hand they need to be mindful that exposure also is much better now, with increased internet penetration and various educational apps, online courses available on something as accessible as a smartphone. Exposure comes in many ways i.e. our schooling, socio-economic environment, Hobbies like reading, traveling, sports, arts etc. Each of these adds to perceptiveness of a person.

These factors decide our approach towards a professional life very early on. Skill sets are obviously very important but youths and their parents should also try to increase the life-experience exposure as much as possible; this makes them smarter, resourceful and independent to make smart choices.

The necessary skill sets come after competencies and the ones that should be focused on are:

• Soft skills and over-all grooming i.e. communication, body-language, inter-personal skills, dressing-style etc. makes you a pleasant person to come-by.
• General Aptitude i.e. language, mathematics, reasoning, reading comprehension forms the base of all other skills that can be acquired at any stage of someone’s career.
• General awareness makes you an informed person who can conduct his basic duties and be aware of rights in a society; general awareness makes you perceptive of how you should conduct yourself in a society.

In the end comes the skill sets and is just the tip of the iceberg. Skill sets at any stage in our professional life has to cascade out of current developments in our commercial/economic environment.

For example, the current trending buzzwords in India are data, energy, environment-conservation, security and safety, infrastructural growth, start-ups, electric vehicles, politics, investments, taxation regime. All these buzzwords have a full gamut of career-options surrounding them. If we pick any two of these, suppose “data” and “electric vehicles”, we see that there are companies looking for data science specialists that can help them build self-driven electric vehicles.

What are the skill sets required for the youth in country to be employable?

Now this would be an ideal place for a science student with background of mechanical engineering and data science where the data science is a skill set acquired most likely at a later stage or with the engineering education. There are many permutation and combination of these buzzwords and career options emanating out of them. What matters is overall exposure and the competencies to be cognizant of the career-opportunities and then developing suitable skill sets for a chosen area.