An integrated, multi-year skills development program created by Accenture and the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) will mobilize 3,300 Jammu and Kashmir youth and equip them with employment skills over the next five years, providing support ranging from identifying potential students through job placement.

The program is part of the government of India’s Udaan initiative to address socio-economic development by helping young people acquire the necessary skills to work in corporate India.

“Accenture is deeply committed to contributing to India’s quest to become a high-performance nation. This engagement is another extension of our effort to shore up India’s growth prospects. We are working closely with NSDC on this important mission and are committed to the program’s success,” said Nilaya Varma, managing director of Accenture’s Health & Public Service business in India.
Accenture will provide management consulting services to create training that blends traditional, classroom-based instruction with “on-the-job” training. Students will be selected from across Jammu and Kashmir and trained for positions in the business process outsourcing industry. Accenture also will collaborate with external agencies to leverage expertise and presence in the state.

The work reflects Accenture’s global corporate citizenship initiative, Skills to Succeed, which plans to equip 500,000 people around the world by 2015 with the skills to get a job or build a business.

The Indian government created the NSDC in 2009 to work with private-sector companies and organizations to ensure that an additional 150 million people would have the necessary skill sets to be productively engaged by 2022. The National Skilling Mission that encompasses the role of NSDC and 17 Union Ministries is targeted to train 500 million people by 2022. Earlier this month, Accenture and NSDC released research that identified five steps to meet that target.

“Our association with Accenture is a perfect fit since Accenture has developed similar training curriculum for various clients in the past and is well equipped to create the same for this project. We hope to benefit from Accenture’s wealth of experience in consulting research,” said Dilip Chenoy, CEO, National Skill Development Corporation.

The long drawn global slowdown, which has dealt debilitating blows to the economies of most countries across continents, seems to have run its course. In anticipation of an economic revival, MDI, Gurgaon, India announces the first conference of series of global conferences on the theme ‘Managing in Recovering Markets’ in March 2014 at its Gurgaon (India) campus. This conference is intended to serve as a platform for researchers, business practitioners, academics, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and media-persons to deliberate upon the causes and consequences of the evolving environment, the challenges emanating there from and the strategic responses to these challenges.

Speaking on the announcement of Global Conference 2014, Prof S Chatterjee, Global Conference Chair, MDI Gurgaon said, “The conference is a curtain raiser event to identify the required areas of development and research to manage the recovering cross country markets. The conference would have session tracks on a wide range of management discipline. This is a great platform for researchers, academicians to put forward their work. A few selected papers may be sent for publication in a special issue for the GCMRM 2014 of leading international journals including MDI journal, VISION – The Journal of Business Perspective.”