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Skills Development

The UK and India have much to gain from a partnership in Skills Development area since both face significant economic and social challenges and can draw on the considerable expertise and experience that exists within the UK’s existing skills sector. India has set extremely ambitious vocational skills targets and will require the development of massive additional delivery capacity. This, in turn, will require an infrastructure that ensures that the training delivered provides skills that are economically valuable and meet the needs of modern industry. UKIERI through this strand aims to facilitate the creation of strong partnerships and joint ventures that can take on various parts of these “pipelines” for key sectors, locations or themes.

The Skills Strand will focus on capacity building for vocational education, enabling an increase in the level of engagement between our countries’ respective skills sectors, backed up by research to inform the development of innovative, viable and sustainable partnership models. The Strand will then identify and support a small number of consortia to convert strong concepts into business propositions that can secure the necessary start-up funding.

The aim of the Capacity Building for Vocational Education Providers sub-strand is to support the development of the training capacity of Indian vocational education schools/institutions by providing opportunities for UK institutions to form partnerships. It will do this by providing grants to UK FE colleges or support organisations to enable them to work in partnership with vocational education schools/institutions.

Key Objectives:

  • To provide opportunities to organisations/consortia for training need identification and for delivery of training and setting up of Centers of Excellence in partnership with industry bodies/SMEs to ensure skills’ providers and other bodies in the UK and India are better equipped to work with each other
  • To enable the development of a strong Indian sector skills infrastructure focusing on employer engagement approaches, developing curriculum and qualifications, certification and assessment etc
  • To provide travel grants to facilitate partner finding and working on a full grant proposal

India UK Roundtable on Skills Development

India UK roundtable on Skills Development was jointly organized by Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India and UKIERI on 20th April in New Delhi. The roundtable brought together key stakeholders working on the agenda of Skills Development in India and the UK to discuss opportunities for collaboration and partnership through UKIERI. The roundtable was presided over by Shri Kapil Sibal, Honourable Minister of Human Resource Development, Government of India.

Both sides endorsed that that UKIERI is guided by the interest of education sectors in both countries and Skills Development strand is the key strand of the program which should focus to enhance initiatives between further education institutes in India and the UK. Detailed report including presentations from the distinguished panellists would be uploaded shortly.

Click here to read the minutes

Click here to read detailed report