Apprentice Hiring in India | Scope, Outlook, and Hiring Methods
Apprentices provide both short and long-term advantages to employers in India. Know the scope, outlook, and methods of hiring apprentices through this article here:
A comprehensive employers’ guide to hiring apprentices
Practically everyone knows about apprenticeships. However, over the past decade, employers and budding employees have realized the value of apprenticeships. This is due to various reforms provided by the government to make it simpler and more profitable for employers. Other factors that contribute to the enthusiasm include
- Inspiration from success stories,
- Fear of missing out (FOMO),
- Legal notices that have ensured safety of apprentice rights
- Higher pay scale coupled with opportunity
What is the scope of apprenticeship in India?
Taking an apprenticeship has both short and long-term advantages. Nevertheless, despite being aware of the system, many employers are still unaware of its benefits and have shied away. Let's look at a few statistics that should motivate firms to support apprenticeships.
- The NSDC has selected several TPAs during the past 5–6 years to assist companies in the end-to-end implementation of apprenticeships.
- In order to boost the MSME sector, a subsidy is given to organisations to prevent them from going through financial difficulty. It is also offered to large corporations as an incentive to participate in hiring more apprentices.
- Keeping the Apprenticeship Rules of 2015 in mind, the 2014 amendment has been decriminalised. This allows employers with a minimum of 4 employees to hire apprentices.
- Businesses that operate multiple shifts have the freedom to hire apprentices who are at least 18 years old for odd-hour hours with the authority's consent.
- In accordance with the New Education Policy, the employer can work with academic institutions to design a degree apprenticeship that is specifically tailored to the needs of industry-relevant job roles. This will help to address the skills gap in the sector and establish a reliable supply chain for apprenticeship engagement.
Outlook towards Apprenticeship in India
Approximately 72% of employers in India seek to hire apprentices in 2022. According to the net apprenticeship outlook (NAO) study, has increased to 56% in the first half of 2022 as compared to only 11% in the same period for 2021.
The outlook towards hiring apprentices in India has become more positive across the majority of sectors. To elaborate, 82% of engineering companies, 74% of automobile brands, and 70% of retail brands are keener to hire apprentices this year.
This report also states that employers across Chennai (75%), Ahmedabad (72%), and Delhi (70%) intend to hire more apprentices in 2022 and beyond. Employers are interested in hiring apprentices for data analytics executives (23%), production (20%), and maintenance technician-electrical (20%) domains.
Apart from just hiring apprentices, employers are making a change by willing to pay them more than before. Since 2022, approximately 25% more apprentices are getting paid in the range of INR 15,000-20,000 per month. Comparatively, it was only 15% in 2021.
Best methods to hire apprentices in India
As an employer, while there are many reasons to hire apprentices, you must evaluate why you want to hire them. Apprenticeships are a versatile tool to discover the appropriate people, increase productivity, manage attrition, and reduce hiring expenses. It is time to stop seeing apprenticeships as a necessary evil to comply with the law.
- Have a set criterion so that you can find the right kind of people to work with your brand. Give those who satisfy 60–70% of the requirements the chance to assess and hone the required competencies through apprenticeships and develop the talent internally. To do this, go beyond schools and colleges when hiring apprentices.
- Make your decision a no-brainer. Talent creation is usually more economical than talent acquisition. The number of apprentices hired is closely connected to the recruiting cost savings.
- The systematic method of learning via apprenticeships establishes a firm basis for people's and organisations' productivity, lowering the cost of quality. Furthermore, the talent's real-time availability lowers the potential of loss of productivity due to attrition.
With the higher absorption rate of apprentices who are pooled into employment, companies are bound to save higher while giving a wide range of incumbents an opportunity to prove themselves.
Top sectors hiring apprentices in India
Manufacturing, engineering, agriculture, and agrochemicals are the major industries that hire apprentices in India. Approximately 13% more businesses in these industries are anticipated to expand their apprenticeship programmes, with e-commerce coming in second at 11%.
The top profiles that employers are searching for include IT technicians, QA engineers, and production technicians, the survey states.
The propensity to recruit apprentices recovered the quickest in small enterprises. Comparatively, 47% of these businesses said in the second half that they would be open to hiring more apprentices than 35% had in the first. Additionally, the share of small businesses reducing hiring decreased from 27% to 24%.
Medium-sized enterprises saw a shift from 58% to 64%, while large businesses saw an increase from 65% to 73% in the number of apprentices they hired. According to the research, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra continue to be the top three states with the highest percentage of new apprenticeship possibilities.
About 178,000 opportunities were created between August and December 2020, according to statistics. In the January to May time frame this year, this number decreased to around 137,000, with the greatest drops occurring in April and May when the nation was gripped by the second wave of Covid-19.
Conclusion
The government has simplified several procedures to incentivise apprenticeship training for doubling the number of apprentices in the country from 5 lakhs to 10 lakhs by the end of the year.
Some changes including stipend payment proof that needs to be furnished to candidates when payment is made through a payment gateway. The clause for holding back stipends until the last quarter has been removed too. These friendly policies are geared to increase apprenticeship trainings in India driving the oldest public-private partnership in history to help get the youth into the labour market. The experience will render them with handy technical and core skills that would be beneficial for them to take up new jobs, in the present and in the future. The efforts are crucial for industries to retain world-class talent, which is ready to thrive in the real world.
