The year 2025 has quietly underscored a critical reality for India’s global competitiveness: artificial intelligence alone will not determine success. What will matter far more is how quickly Indian workers can adapt to it. While public debate often centres on fears of AI-driven job losses, the deeper disruption lies in the speed at which jobs themselves are changing—far faster than India’s education, certification, and hiring systems can respond.
Jobs are changing faster than credentials
Globally, skills required for AI-exposed roles are evolving at a pace nearly 66% faster than those in less-exposed occupations, according to PwC estimates. India, with one of the world’s youngest and largest workforces, is particularly vulnerable to this churn. Degrees, once a durable signal of employability, are rapidly losing relevance in a labour market where skills can become obsolete within two or three years.
This mismatch is stark in engineering and technology. India produces more than 1.5 million engineering graduates every year, yet industry surveys consistently show that fewer than half are immediately employable in emerging digital roles. This is not a failure of talent or effort, but a failure of alignment—between what institutions teach, what employers need, and how skills are formally recognised.
India’s quiet shift towards self-driven learning
Indian workers have already begun responding to this reality. The country is witnessing a silent but significant learning boom, driven by online and modular education. Enrolments in AI, data science, cybersecurity, and cloud computing have surged across global and domestic platforms. India now ranks among the top global markets for online professional learning, with millions of workers upgrading skills alongside full-time employment.
This marks a behavioural shift. Learning is no longer remedial, undertaken after job loss, but anticipatory—motivated by the fear of obsolescence and the hope of upward mobility. Government initiatives such as the Skill India Mission, PMKVY, and the National Education Policy 2020 have helped legitimise lifelong learning and vocational mobility.
The paradox of skills without recognition
Despite this surge in learning, a paradox persists. Employers continue to rely heavily on traditional signals—degrees, institutional brand names, and years of experience—when making hiring decisions. As a result, many workers possess current, job-ready skills that remain invisible to recruiters.
The Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that nearly 44–46% of core job skills in India will change by 2030. Traditional credentials were never designed for such velocity. This disconnect leads to widespread skill underutilisation, talent mismatches, and slower productivity growth.
The economic cost of ignoring skills
India’s labour market inefficiencies are not merely individual hardships; they are macroeconomic constraints. Despite its reputation as a global IT powerhouse, India faces persistent shortages in AI specialists, cybersecurity professionals, semiconductor technicians, and green-energy experts. At the same time, millions of trained youth remain underemployed or trapped in low-productivity roles.
Insights from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph suggest that better skills recognition alone could multiply India’s effective AI talent pool by unlocking capabilities already present in the workforce. For a country aspiring to a $5 trillion economy, this represents a significant and relatively low-cost opportunity.
Digital infrastructure without digital skills recognition
India has built world-class digital public infrastructure—Aadhaar, “”, UPI, and the broader digital public stack. Yet skills remain largely analogue. Certificates are fragmented across universities, private platforms, training centres, and informal work experience, with no unified, verifiable record.
This gap becomes more critical as India positions itself in high-growth sectors such as AI, semiconductor manufacturing, renewable energy, defence production, health technology, and digital public services. Without portable and trusted skills recognition, labour mobility across sectors and states will remain constrained.
The case for an Indian skills passport
The solution does not lie in discarding degrees, but in complementing them with a national digital skills passport—a continuously updated and verifiable record of an individual’s capabilities. Such a system could capture skills acquired through formal education, online learning, apprenticeships, industry training, and on-the-job experience.
Linked to DigiLocker and Aadhaar, with robust privacy safeguards, this passport would allow employers to verify competencies directly rather than infer them indirectly through degrees. India already has partial building blocks, such as the National Skills Qualification Framework and sector skill councils, but these operate in silos and lack widespread employer adoption.
From degree-centric to skills-first hiring
A credible skills passport could transform hiring practices. It would enable faster recruitment, smoother career transitions, and greater confidence among workers to move into emerging fields like AI, climate technologies, and advanced manufacturing. More importantly, it would encourage firms to hire based on demonstrated ability rather than pedigree—an essential shift in a country as socially and regionally diverse as India.
What India must do next
India’s next productivity leap will come not from importing technology, but from unlocking the full value of its human capital. This requires a coordinated shift:
- Integrating learning platforms, skilling programmes, and industry certifications into a national digital skills registry aligned with labour market demand.
- Encouraging skills-first hiring through public procurement norms and policy nudges.
- Reorienting skilling incentives from enrolment numbers to employment outcomes.
- Supporting continuous learning through tax incentives, credit-linked skilling, and employer co-investment.
What to note for Prelims?
- Skill India Mission, PMKVY, and NEP 2020
- World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report
- Concept of skills-first hiring and digital credentials
- Role of DigiLocker and Aadhaar in digital public infrastructure
What to note for Mains?
- Impact of AI on labour markets and skill requirements
- Limits of degree-based credential systems in a fast-changing economy
- Role of digital public infrastructure in labour market reform
- Policy measures to improve skill recognition and labour mobility
If the 2010s were India’s decade of digital infrastructure and the 2020s its phase of AI adoption, the 2030s will be defined by how quickly Indians can learn, unlearn, and—crucially—be recognised for what they know. The question is no longer whether India has talent, but whether it can build a system that sees, trusts, and mobilises that talent at speed.
