Structured Skill Development in Indian Automotive Industry – A CSR Endeavor Toward Enhancing Employbility

Owing to several competitive advantages, India is fast evolving as a major global manufacturing hub by attracting investors across the globe due to the abundance of inexpensive labor and other favorable investing environments. Particularly within the sectors of mass manufacturing, the Indian automotive sector has already established itself as one of the prime sectors in employing a skilled workforce. But, the major challenge the sector faces is the availability of rightly skilled resources. Apart from the availability of the right skill, there is another key challenge that the Indian industry faces is the inconstancy in human skills, which leads to quality inconstancy. This poses a serious threat to the Indian manufacturing industry toward emerging as a global manufacturing hub. Here lies the importance of up-skilling in a structured manner on which this research paper focuses to identify various underlying factors in this aspect and develops a structured solution to negate the possibilities of inconsistency in product quality due to human skill. Structured up-skilling to provide a holistic understanding of the overall manufacturing in terms of technology, quality, process engineering, safety, etc., to handle the process complexity in a better manner along with standardized workstation-level training, robust evaluation, and deployment process is needed to bridge the vast skill gap that is prevailing in the Indian automotive industry.