India produces millions of graduates every year, yet employability surveys consistently show a significant proportion aren’t job-ready by industry standards. This isn’t a failure of ambition or intelligence, but rather a structural gap between how academia defines success and how employers define readiness, shared Salil Pande, Founder and CEO VMock Inc. in an exclusive interview with Kaanchi Chawla of Elets News Network (ENN). Edited excerpts:
VMock works with 250+ institutions globally to deliver AI-powered career guidance at scale. What does this experience tell you about the single biggest gap between what universities teach and what students actually need to navigate a career successfully?
After working with over 250 institutions across the world from Columbia and Kellogg to LBS, INSEAD, ISB, and NUS one insight has emerged with striking consistency: universities are extraordinarily good at building intellectual capability, but there remains a significant, and widening, gap in equipping students to navigate the world of work. The biggest gap isn’t knowledge, it is in translation of this knowledge to real world work scenarios. Students graduate with strong academics but struggle to understand how their skills map to industry roles, build their brand, develop their presence, or articulate their value compellingly.
What VMock has learned is that students don’t just need career advice; they need instant, objective, personalised feedback to understand where they stand and how to close the gap to their career path. AI makes this possible at scale, delivering coaching once reserved for the privileged few to every student, everywhere. VMock’s unique advantage is that we have built our data sets, algorithms, and capabilities over the years based on continuous feedback from students, career coaches, higher education institutions, and employers. This enables our platform to draw from highly relevant and absolutely current market insights, and remain a step ahead of the constant change in the careers space.
India is home to one of the world’s largest graduate populations, yet employability remains a persistent challenge. From VMock’s experience working across institutions, what is the most critical intervention the Indian higher education system needs to make to close this gap?
India produces millions of graduates every year, yet employability surveys consistently show a significant proportion aren’t job-ready by industry standards. This isn’t a failure of ambition or intelligence, but rather a structural gap between how academia defines success and how employers define readiness. At VMock, we have seen that the most critical intervention is embedding career development as a continuous, structured experience throughout the academic journey and not a last-minute sprint in the final semester. Students who build professional profiles early, receive iterative developmental feedback, and practice interviews long before placements begin, perform dramatically better when it matters the most.
India’s higher education system has world-class intellectual capital. What it needs now is a commitment to provide work integrated learning, consistent industry immersion, and supplementing cognitive skills with emphasis on growing learnability, problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills. Investment in platforms that provide personalised guidance to every student and help them apply and build their knowledge through simulations that mirror real world scenarios is an important step in empowering students to achieve their potential.
What we have seen work in advanced institutions is a constant and symbiotic interaction between academia and industry, and a commitment to student success that is a priority for everyone at these institutions.
Global employers today are hiring across borders, a graduate in Bengaluru is competing with one in Boston or Berlin for the same role. What does career readiness look like in this borderless talent market, and are India’s graduates prepared for it?
The borderless talent market is a present reality. When a company in Singapore posts a role, it evaluates profiles from Mumbai, Manchester, and Miami simultaneously. The benchmark is global. This changes everything about what career readiness must mean. Global readiness demands three things: an internationally benchmarked professional profile, the ability to communicate with clarity and confidence across cultural contexts, and genuine digital fluency, including how to add value in AI-augmented workplaces.
Are India’s graduates prepared? Some absolutely are, and they’re thriving. But for the majority, there is work to do. The communication gap remains real. The ability to present oneself with confidence in a global context, whether on a LinkedIn profile or in a video interface, is still underdeveloped for many. At VMock, our platform benchmarks candidates against global standards and what we see is that students who commit to the structured, iterative, and adaptive feedback process improve dramatically. The potential is there. The preparedness needs to match the ambition.
Also Read: From Campus to Career: How Tharika Raju is Redefining Future-Ready Education
What is your message to higher education institutions as they look to transform themselves drawing from everything VMock has learned working with the world’s leading universities?
My message is simple: the time for incremental change has passed.
From our work with some of the world’s leading universities, we have learned that real transformation happens when three things come together: leadership conviction, the right technology, and a culture that sees career development as everyone’s responsibility — not just that of the placement office.
My co-founder, Kiran, and I have dedicated our professional lives to this mission because we deeply believe that every student, regardless of background, deserves access to the kind of career guidance that was once available only to a privileged few. AI has made that possible. The technology exists. What we need now is the leadership’s will to deploy it in ways that create value for students, employers, and, most importantly, institutions themselves.
To every leader in Indian higher education: your students are competing in a global arena. Give them the right tools to succeed in it. The institutions that embrace this shift will not only transform student outcomes, but also redefine their own reputations in the process.
