Current and Emerging Challenges in Vocational Education

This article will be dealing at the challenges facing the vocational education stream In India and suggestions to improve the quality of education imparted in the vocational streams. The NPE 2016 Committee recognizes the need for integrating skills with education, particularly in secondary education and outlines the challenges and broad strategy for the future. A comprehensive National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship was formulated in 2015 and a Mission was set up by Government of India, with the objective of training 40 crore people by 2022. In 83 order to implement the Mission, necessary institutional frame work has been put in place, which includes: National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF) and Sector Skill Councils (SSCs) for standards (33 SSCs are operational), National Skill Development Agency (NSDA) for administering the NSQF, National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) for creating/ augmenting the training delivery capacity an exclusive Ministry for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) for coordination. There are many challenges to the quality of the vocational education imparted in India, which has been addressed in this paper, like the Vocational education is not "aspirational" for the students, the parents and the community at large for variety of reasons, social and economic, the current initiative of MHRD in introducing vocational education subjects in schools, although a good beginning seems to be inadequate, both in terms of its reach/coverage and integration with the formal academic system, The schools do not have the requisite workshops, trainers and the industry linkages to impart high quality and relevant vocational skills. It's very important to deal with these challenges, as vocational education will be playing a very important role dealing with the job market and employability in the future. Students and the parent community have to be sensitised about the benefits of skill education and the schools need to be actively taking part in this initiative. Infrastructure needs to be adequate along with the trained manpower to achieve the desired results and quality in vocational education