As per industry estimates, India currently ranks fourth in the civil aviation market, with around 116.7 million passengers –inbound and outbound. By 2035, the Indian Civil Aviation sector will employ and estimated 0.8 to 1 million personnel directly and another 3 million indirectly across the segments of Airport, Airlines, Cargo, MRO and Ground Handling.

To address the skilled manpower requirement in the sectors, NSDC is organizing an industry seminar on February 6 at the 11th Def Expo 2020 to be held in Lucknow from February 5-9, 2020. Def Expo provides a platform for all industry stakeholders to meet and discuss industry issues, solutions and best practices. At the seminar, NSDC aims to host a productive dialogue on various skill related issues including reducing the skill gap in the aerospace, aviation and defense sectors.  Deliberations will also be on the rapid digitization in the sectors and the availability of a competent workforce in the country to cater to the needs of the industry and its digital transformation.

To highlight the achievements of the AASSC’s partnership with NSDC, the Air India SATS Airport Services Pvt. Ltd (AISATS) Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) initiative has oriented, assessed and certified over 3179 candidates, till now. Further, the project aims to assess and certify around 6,700 candidates by AASSC for 13 Job Roles.Multi-Skill Development Centre (MSDC) for Aviation Skilling has been set-up at Chandigarh under the CSR scheme to train about 2,400 youth over the 3 years. The job roles identified for this initiative include Airline Customer Service Executive; Airline Security Executive; Airline Reservation Agent; Airline Flight Load Controller; Airline Cargo Assistant and Airline Ramp Executive.

National Aerospace Laboratories (N.A.L), a premier aerospace R&D laboratory under CSIR, inaugurated an Aerospace Skill Development Centre, catering to Design & Development and Manufacturing Assembly subsectors on 1st Jun 2019 at Bengaluru. The centreis being affiliated to AASSC framework and will offer short-term skill certification courses under NSQF. Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (H.A.L) has initiated training under Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL). 230 candidates for the Job Roles of Aerospace Structural Fitter, Aerospace CNC Machinist, Aerospace Composite Technician & Aerospace Conventional Machinist have been assessed and certified under the project.

AASSC has also conducted assessments for the Indian Navy personnel under Aviation & MRO sub sector Job Roles like Airline Security Executive, Aircraft Power plant Technician & Aircraft Instrument Technician. A total of 472 candidates were assessed and certified until September 2019.

As India positions itself to achieve strong economic growth, availability of a highly-skilled workforce that can help organizations across sectors to maintain their competitive capabilities is necessary. NSDC with the support of its training partners aims to create highly specialized workforce from the existing talent pool by initiating skill programmes and modules. The training partners will run skill programmes based on industry centric curriculum. These are short term programmes, ranging from 3 to 6 months. The idea is not to replace the academic system but to bridge the industry-academic gap and provide industry-ready workers to companies.