Baby Ursa is borne to Team Ursa Minor today. But before that:

While the world is aging up by each passing day, India is getting younger. And younger. Another ten-twelve year and we will be the largest force of working age people in the world. Roughly a hundred crore. A huge supply side ensured. On the other hand, the world work force will start shrinking. A huge demand too is ensured. No wonder many socio-economists have given a name to this India centric phenomenon, ‘Demographic Dividend’. Good for the country? Pl read on.

Like many other socio-economic factors, the opposite of this ‘demographic dividend factor’ too is equally true. Whichever the industrialist, the business house, the office manager I meet, I get to hear the same story. That they are unable to find the ‘right people’, the ‘qualified people’ to fill in their vacancies. So much so that the employers have been keeping their projects ‘on hold for want of the ‘right people’. According to some estimates, India currently has 3.5 cr such ‘vacant’ positions. Now, who are these ‘right’ or ‘qualified people’?

For an employer, the ‘right’ or the ‘qualified’ person is the one who has necessary ‘skills’ for the job, the employer is having a vacancy of. The one who is almost ‘job ready’ and requires not much handholding, once hired. The one, who apart from the required ‘domain skill’ has supporting ‘soft skills’ and ‘information technology skills’. A combination of these three skills, viz, domain knowledge, soft skills and knowledge of relevant IT only makes a person ‘skilled’ or ‘job ready’. More so, for the industry of Banking and Financial Services. Skilling our youth to make them employable is a key requirement of the nation. Otherwise, ten years later, the unfilled vacancies may rise to over 20 cr.

It won’t take much time for ‘demographic dividend’ to become ‘demographic nightmare’.

Imparting ‘Genuine Higher Education’ can sort out some of this issue but we hardly have financial resources to tackle this. Now, not only in the Indian context, but in the global context as well, knowledge of ‘Banking and Financial Services’ comes at par with ‘Higher Education’, irrespective of our banker being a 10th pass.

Every skill has a use. Skills never become irrelevant if they keep getting revisited and upgraded from time to time. In my last 33 years’ experience, I have yet to see a banking skill becoming irrelevant. A skill, any skill earned by anyone is not a personal property. It is national property. So, it can not be allowed to go waste. It has to be passed on. Generally, we let our skills die on two occasions, 1) when we change careers we get so much busy with our new line of activity that we do not bother to pass on that repository of knowledge to others and 2) when we retire and the will to pass on the huge stockpile of skills dies a natural death. Hence, this is our responsibility to keep passing on our skills to others from time to time. Imagine a scenario where every Indian skill is treated as a national treasure and is recycled and recirculated to the youth who need it. Specially the youth who are not from fancy towns, fancy colleges and with fancy degrees.

If that happens, we will be the knowledge capital, the skill capital and the wisdom capital of the world. Simply unbeatable. The job creation will be automatic as there will always be a matching skill for a required job profile. An employer’s delight.

Ursa Minor is a small step in this direction. We want to be connected with more and more people coming on board as co-founders. We need help! Do we need your money? No! We need your experience and your skills? Yes!

Currently we are focussing to train and upskill the ‘unemployable job seeker in the BFS Sector’. Our areas of upskilling are: domain knowledge of BFS, soft skills and the relevant IT.

Please support us to create a new, skilled ecosystem where no employers keep their projects or expansions on hold in absence of skilled youth.

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