Book offers lessons on skill sets, endless possibilities

New Delhi, July 15

With World Youth Skills Day celebrated on today and India trying to enable a holistic training approach through its Skill India campaign, a new book seeks to educate people about sweeping and endless possibilities in this regard.

"Now That We Are Here", written by Akshay Tyagi and Akshat Tyagi and published by Penguin India, also touches upon critical themes like design, AI, data and behavioural economics.

According to Akshat, whether the Indian youth is skilled enough and prepared for a role depends on "who you're talking about and what scale of ambition you'll be content with".

India in its vastness has different floors in this problem of skilling up, he argues.

He feels that a large chunk of the country will experience economic mobility in spite of their skill-level because their average income is so low compared to even middle income countries.

"But when it comes to the middle-class whose parents had good jobs in the formal economy for one or two generations, it's going to get so much tougher to thrive with our current education and training systems. For the most aspirational who want to be the creators of exponential wealth, we look like missing the bus already," he adds.

The book harnesses the wisdom of thought leaders and intellectuals throughout history by blending business and humanity, industry and society, and by covering cross-disciplinary themes.

On challenges, Akshat says he thinks "we fail to engage deeply with core technologies and pay attention to only their applications".

For instance, how many of us expect India to build the first self-driving car or the first quantum computer or the first brain-computer interface or to do critical research in economics, psychology or design, he asks.

"I don't think many, and we don't even consider this an urgent crisis. Indians are going to participate heavily in the development of these technologies, but not for Indian companies or in India. It isn't a question of prestige, rather of who controls and creates wealth in the next few decades," he says.

The authors say the aim of their book is to "help people get excited and maybe to even make them a little anxious about what's coming".

"The most important advances don't get the attention they deserve in India, while we become their biggest market," Akshat says.

The book seeks to answer questions like how do you prepare for a future if you don't know what it is, how do you specialise in anything if the horizon is constantly shifting, what's the goalpost and how do we get there, is there even a goalpost?

The authors say it is time to educate ourselves for sweeping and endless possibilities and one way to do that is to blur the lines among technology, democracy, design, economics and data, and reconfigure the approach to learning altogether. PTI

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