Amit Kapoor, Atul Tiwari and Mukul Anand
As India navigates the demands of the global knowledge economy, the integration of education and vocational skilling has become a cornerstone of its national strategy. The recently released report by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, ‘Skills for the Future: Transforming India’s Workforce Landscape’, prepared by the Institute for Competitiveness, provides a timely analysis of the current state of India’s skill and training landscape. The report underscores the urgency of integrating vocational training, education, and the occupational landscape to achieve two main objectives: driving India’s economic growth and increasing individual prosperity.
The report highlights a pivotal shift in India’s skilling landscape towards valuing learning outcomes, a change embodied by the National Credit Framework (NCrF), a key instrument for operationalizing the new National Education Policy (NEP), 2020. It combines skilling, re-skilling, up-skilling, accreditation, and evaluation, encompassing educational and skilling institutions and the workforce. The NCrF’s importance lies in its mission to mainstream vocational and experiential learning by dismantling the wall between academic and vocational streams. It established a standard measurable criterion based on learning outcomes, ensuring that skill and academic courses can be considered equivalent and parity if they meet the defined standards.
Thus, a student pursuing a traditional academic degree (like a B.A. or B.Sc.) can choose vocational subjects or skill-based courses and have the learning hours and effort recognized with credits. A student in a vocational program can supplement their training with academic subjects (like communication, critical thinking, or science fundamentals) to gain a more well-rounded education.
The NCrF, designed as a unified system, enables unprecedented mobility where credits are the common currency that can be earned through learning outcomes, not just classroom hours. The framework allows for integrating and mixing education, skilling, and work experience, enabling students to move fluidly between the domains. A student can pause their academic program, undertake a skill-based training or an internship, gain relevant work experience, and have all of it creditized. These credits contribute to their qualification when they return to their academic degree. The credits a student earns in an academic setting can be used to meet the eligibility criteria for a vocational program. This mobility is a direct result of the equivalence established by the framework, meaning a student doesn’t need a separate certificate to prove their academic qualifications are relevant for a skilling course.
Further, by enabling multiple entry and multiple exit (ME-ME) options, NCrF powers flexibility as the core operational principle that facilitates the blend of academic learning and skilling. To operationalise this, NCrF proposes a single, robust credit framework in the form of the Academic Bank of Credit (ABC), a digital repository where all learning, whether academic, vocational, or experiential, is valued, assessed, and recorded. The ME-ME provision allows a student to exit a degree program, acquire a specific skill set demanded by the industry, and re-enter the academic program later.
This means credits from a university (academic), a vocational training institute (skilling), and an internship (experiential) can all be deposited in one place and later redeemed for a certificate, diploma, or degree. A learner from a general education background can use their accumulated academic credits to enter a vocational program at an appropriate level. This ensures they don’t have to start from scratch and that their prior academic learning is valued and recognized within the skilling ecosystem. This transformation of India’s education and skilling landscape hinges on successfully implementing the framework. This large-scale national initiative has several nodes and layers of realisation, and the focus has now shifted to ensuring that the priorities achieve full potential.
A key opportunity lies in deepening the integration between the various pillars of the skills ecosystem. For instance, the ‘Skills for the Future: Transforming India’s Workforce Landscape’ report identifies that one crucial step is ensuring that all Awarding Bodies mandated with to certifying trainees for NSQF-aligned and approved qualifications recognized by the National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET) are fully synced with the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) portal. As per the NCVET website, 130 Awarding Bodies have been onboarded. With 130 Awarding Bodies onboarded, as per the NCVET website, compared to 62 skill-related awarding institutions being listed on the ABC portal, accelerating their complete integration with the ABC will further streamline the credit transfer process for students across the country.
Similarly, the report advocated activating credit accounts for skilling candidates, representing a significant milestone. The framework is designed to creditize every form of learning, including prior work experience. The immediate priority is accelerating the operationalization of the APAAR ID (Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry) for vocational learners. This will empower them to accumulate credits in their ABC accounts, turning a policy vision into a tangible asset for their careers.
With these implementation steps, the NCrF’s architectural plan can enable building a transformative national skilling infrastructure. India is on the verge of converting this powerful blueprint into a vibrant ecosystem by focusing on the operational synergy between our educational and skilling institutions. Additionally, for the framework to succeed and ensure a future-ready workforce, there is a need to look beyond vocational training. As the Skills for the Future report highlights, a successful strategy requires an integrated, three-dimensional view that triangulates information across the country’s educational, occupational, and vocational landscapes. This means assessing the foundational skills provided by general education, understanding the real-time demands of the job market (the occupational landscape), and ensuring vocational training acts as a responsive bridge between the two. This triangulation is the key to creating a truly adaptive and effective system. Successfully strengthening the skilling infrastructure’s operationalization guided by an integrated three-dimensional view of skilling will unlock immense potential, truly empowering millions of learners and building a robust bridge between education and industry.
(Amit Kapoor is chair and Mukul Anand is researcher, Institute for Competitiveness. Atul Tiwari is secretary, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India).
The article was published with Business World on July 7, 2025.
