Skill Yatra: The Story Behind India’s 2019 Skill Gap Campaign

Back in 2019, IMS Proschool launched a small but ambitious CSR initiative called Skill Yatra — a campaign built around a simple, uncomfortable question the country was grappling with at the time: why did India have so many degree-holders and so few job-ready professionals? This post revisits the thinking that shaped that campaign — the skill gap conversation as it stood in 2018-19 — as context for why we did what we did, not as a claim about where things stand today.

A skill gap, in the simplest terms, is the distance between what employers need from a new hire and what that hire can actually do on day one. In the years leading up to 2019, this gap had become a major talking point in Indian business and policy circles. Young graduates were collecting degrees and certifications at a record pace, yet employers across sectors — IT especially — reported struggling to find people who could perform the job they were qualified for on paper.

At the time, data cited by Forbes (drawing on 2014 figures) ranked India as the second-largest country grappling with this kind of skill mismatch. Separately, industry commentary from that period put the share of Indian graduates considered job-ready at a strikingly low level — figures that were widely quoted (including in our own earlier writing on this topic) as evidence that something structural needed fixing. We’re flagging the age of these numbers deliberately: they were the best available snapshot of the problem in 2014-2019, not a current measure of India’s job market in 2026. Skill-gap research has moved on since, and readers looking for today’s employability statistics should look to more recent NSDC or industry-body data rather than treating these older figures as current.

The pattern that concerned employers, educators and policymakers back then was fairly consistent: students were enrolling in short- and long-term courses and certifications, but many weren’t emerging with practical, applicable skills. A frequently cited example was India’s computer engineering pipeline — a large and growing number of graduates, paired with genuine demand from a booming IT sector, yet a persistent shortfall in graduates who could step into those roles without significant additional training.

For companies, this created a costly bind. Many were forced to hire freshers and invest heavily in training them from scratch, with no guarantee those employees would stay once they became productive — a real risk when skilled talent could be poached by competitors offering better terms. It’s a dynamic still familiar to employers today, even if the specific numbers have shifted.

Recognising the scale of the issue, the Government of India had already taken steps to address it — setting up the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and a dedicated Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. These institutions were part of a broader national push to make vocational and applied training a bigger part of how young Indians prepared for careers.

IMS Proschool wanted to add something to that conversation at ground level — not just policy or classroom training, but a visible, on-the-road push to get students talking about skills, not just degrees. That’s the thinking that led to Skill Yatra: an awareness campaign built around direct engagement with students, rather than another report or seminar.

The campaign didn’t stay a concept for long. In January 2019, it took the form of an actual bicycle roadshow — our director rode several hundred kilometres across Thane, Mumbai and Pune, stopping at colleges along the way to talk to students directly about skills and career readiness. We’ve told that part of the story in detail in our companion post, Mission Skill Yatra: Yatra for Youths, which covers the roadshow itself, the distances covered, and what the on-ground conversations with students looked like.

Looking back, Skill Yatra was less about the specific statistics we cited at the time and more about a conviction that’s held up well: that pairing academic learning with real, applied skills is what actually gets young people hired. That conviction is exactly what continues to shape how we design our own programs today.

Revisiting this topic years later, a few things stand out. First, the specific numbers we cited in 2019 — the Forbes ranking, the graduate-employability figure — were always meant to describe a moment in time, and treating any single statistic as a permanent verdict on a country’s job market was probably too simple even then. Skill gaps narrow and widen with policy changes, industry cycles and the courses available to students, so any snapshot needs a date attached to it.

Second, the government’s institutional response — NSDC, the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, and the broader push toward vocational and applied training — was already underway before Skill Yatra launched, and has continued to evolve since. Our campaign was never meant to replace that work; it was a small, ground-level complement to it, aimed at getting students themselves to internalise the message rather than wait for policy to catch up.

Third, and most durably, the format mattered as much as the message. Talking to students in person, at their own colleges, rather than through a report or a webinar, made the skill-gap conversation feel immediate rather than abstract. That’s a lesson we’ve carried into how we think about student engagement well beyond the campaign itself.

The skill gap conversation looks a little different in 2026 than it did when we first took to the road in 2019 — but the underlying idea that motivated Skill Yatra hasn’t changed. We still believe that credentials matter most when they come paired with real, practical, job-ready skills. That’s the philosophy behind our current programs in CFA, ACCA, US CPA, US CMA, Financial Modeling, CFP, and our combined M.Com/B.Com with ACCA pathways — each built to close exactly the kind of gap Skill Yatra set out to talk about, back in 2019 and still today.