From Training to Trajectories: Why Skills Alone Don’t Guarantee Jobs
Goa’s skilling experience shows why the gap between skills and jobs is not about effort or quality, but about how training meets demand
Prakash Singh: Goa Institute of Management
Sreerupa Sengupta: Goa Institute of Management
SDG 4: Quality Education | SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship | Ministry of Labour and Employment
Large-scale skilling programmes often succeed on paper – measured in enrolments, certifications, and trainee satisfaction – while falling short where it counts most: steady employment and income security. The experience of short-term training under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) in Goa offers a useful, grounded perspective to examine this gap and what it reveals about supply-driven skill certification in local labour markets.
Goa presents a particularly instructive case: tourism, manufacturing, construction, and a broad services sector contribute over 40 percent of the state’s gross output. These sectors depend heavily on semi-skilled and skilled workers – electricians, plumbers, refrigeration technicians, and hospitality staff – precisely the categories that short-term skilling programmes are designed to serve. In principle, this should make Goa fertile ground for quick skilling-to-employment linkages.
Training Delivery Works Better Than Often Assumed
Evidence from Goa suggests that the delivery side of short-term skilling functions better than it is often assumed to. Over nine in ten participants describe the training as adding value to their skills, and a similar proportion express confidence in the trainers and facilities at Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), which serve as the primary delivery platforms.
This matters because it counters a common narrative that skilling programmes fail mainly due to poor quality training. In Goa’s case, the training environment appears functional and credible. Courses are short, free of cost, and accessible – features that lower entry barriers for young people who cannot afford long absences from work. These design choices help explain the strong participation among youth in the 21–25 age group, many of whom are at the threshold of their working lives.
When Certification Does Not Translate into Jobs
The sharpest inflection occurs after certification. Under PMKVY 2.0 in Goa, while over 2,000 candidates enrolled and close to 900 were certified, only about one in four trainees reported finding work related to their training, and placement assistance played a marginal role in their job matching. Many employers did not even recognise the official certificate and hired candidates as low-paid apprentices rather than skilled workers. This created a mismatch between trainee expectations and market reality.
Importantly, once differences in age, work experience, and other background characteristics are accounted for, short-term training is associated with incremental income gains.
At a more fundamental level, something more structural is at play. Many trainees were already earning livelihoods before enrolling, often in informal or semi-formal work. Training, for them, functioned less as an entry ticket into formal employment and more as a way to strengthen existing capabilities, signal competence, or retain flexibility in a changing economy. Accordingly, the reported incomes after training cluster at modest levels, even as perceptions of value remain high, suggesting a lower market premium for the training.
Satisfaction and Employment Measure Different Things
The coexistence of high trainee satisfaction and low placement outcomes is not a contradiction; it reflects two different realities. Satisfaction captures the quality of the training experience and participants’ perception that they have learned something useful. Employment outcomes, by contrast, depend on the structure of the local economy: the availability of jobs, the prevalence of informal hiring, and the extent to which employers actively use formal certification as a screening tool.
This divergence is particularly visible in policy emphasis on entrepreneurship. Despite repeated focus on self-employment and enterprise creation, only a small share of trainees move directly into entrepreneurship after training. Skills may lower entry barriers, but without access to credit, markets, and mentoring, they do not translate automatically into viable enterprises.
Seen through this lens, short-term training performs an enabling rather than a guaranteeing role. It equips individuals to navigate labour markets more flexibly, but it does not ensure stable employment unless complementary conditions are in place.
The Quiet Importance of Intermediaries
When training does not translate automatically into employment, the role of intermediaries becomes critical. Institutions that can bridge skills and work – by signalling credibility to employers, sharing labour market information, and facilitating matching – are especially important in fragmented and informal economies. ITIs are well positioned to play such a role in the skilling ecosystem.
ITIs function as trusted entry points into the skilling system. Nearly half of trainees report first learning about short-term courses through ITIs, far exceeding awareness generated through formal outreach campaigns. This underscores their legitimacy among youth and their proximity to local labour markets. However, this influence operates primarily at the point of enrolment rather than employment, which may potentially erode its value.
In practice, ITIs remain information conduits rather than labour market brokers. They are neither structured nor incentivised to engage systematically with employers, track job outcomes, or support post-certification transitions. Expecting them to deliver placement outcomes without sustained employer engagement, therefore, places unrealistic demands on training institutions.
This gap reflects a design limitation rather than an institutional failure. The skilling system assigns responsibility for skill delivery but leaves labour market intermediation under-specified. As a result, the pipeline effectively ends at certification, even where credible institutions and motivated trainees are present.
From Counting Skills to Designing Pathways
Goa’s experience points toward a more mature approach to skilling policy – one that treats training as an input into employment systems, rather than as a symbolic exercise centred on certifications and targets. Where labour demand is informal, seasonal, or fragmented, the value of skilling lies less in immediate placement and more in adaptability, mobility, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.
Skilling must therefore be embedded in local economic ecosystems: where employers help shape course relevance, career guidance supports trainees in translating skills into opportunities, and training responds to where jobs are emerging rather than where targets are easiest to meet. Goa’s experience does not argue for doing less skilling; it argues for designing the skilling pipeline differently.
Skills cannot replace employment policy – but when aligned with it, they can make labour markets work better for both workers and firms.
Authors:
The discussion in this article is based on the authors' project report on the subject, awarded by Azim Premji University. Views are personal.