New Delhi : How do you know the plumber you called to fix that leaky pipe is good? Or the electrician will do a decent job of installing your new AC. Well, you could go through his work record and qualifications like any other profession.
India is proposing to put in place an extensive rating criterion as part of the skilling initiative that would enable benchmark skilled personnel that includes plumbers, masons, drivers and domestic helps, among others, to be graded on a scale of 1-10 for employability. A senior government official told that the skills development ministry is finalizing the National Skills Qualification Framework NSQF for adoption by 2019, which seeks to create employability benchmarks.
“This will help us to identify well trained personnel, and the employer can make an informed choice,” said the official.
Notified in 2013, the NSQF is a quality assurance framework for which the skills development ministry has laid down a five-year timeline to ensure all skills training, government or private, is NSQF-compliant to help bring about uniformity. At present, more than 100 countries have, or are in the process of developing, national qualification frameworks.
Following this, the recruitment rules of the government of India and PSUs of the central government shall be amended to define eligibility criteria for all positions in terms of NSQF levels. State governments and their PSUs will also be encouraged to amend recruitment rules on above lines.
The NSQF is a competency based framework that organises all qualifications according to a series of levels of knowledge, skills and aptitude. These levels, graded from 1 to 10, are defined in terms of learning outcomes which the learner must possess regardless of whether they are obtained through formal, non-formal or informal learning.
The NSQF will provide for alignment of degrees which will enable mobility between vocational and general education, and allow transition from non-formal to organized job market. Besides, it will enable standardized, consistent and nationally acceptable outcomes of training across the country and help in global mobility of skilled workforce from India through international equivalence of NSQF.
The NSQF provides for a five-year implementation schedule which provides that no government funding would be available for any training/educational programme/course which is not NSQF-compliant after three years. Besides, all government-funded training and educational institutions shall define eligibility criteria for admission to various courses in terms of NSQF levels.
After five years, that is in 2018, it shall be mandatory for all training/educational programmes/courses to be NSQF-compliant as well as define eligibility criteria for admission to various courses in terms of NSQF levels.
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