Transforming employment exchanges into Human Resource Development centres

By transforming employment exchanges into Human Resources Development (HRD) centres, KVTSDC, under the State Labour Ministry, is silently sowing the seeds of a revolution in the State’s employment market.

According to KVTSDC Executive Director, Dr Vishnukanth Chatpalli, the Government of Karnataka’s vision is to make employment exchanges relevant and reorient them to present employment needs, in order to provide value-added services to the entire employment ecosystem. “Our initiative is to find implementable solutions that would provide the state with a scalable model to increase the employability of semi-urban and rural youth of Karnataka” he told Deccan Herald.

Aided by a corpus fund of Rs 30 lakh from the State government, KVTSDC initiated the pilot project under the PPP model at Mangalore and Bijapur in 2009. Later it extended the service to other parts of the State with the help of private service providers like Laures, Team Lease and Manipal Education’s iRize. Now the total number of HRD centres has reached three at Mangalore, Bijapur and Kolar. Plans are afoot to start centres at Mandya, Chamrajnagar, Hubli, Gulbarga, Bellary and Chitradurga.

Registration and assessment

HRD centres play a pivotal role in the registration and assessment of individual candidates who seek their help for employment. Information Technology plays an important role in these fields. According to Team Lease Vice President Neeti Sharma, assessments are an important tool to align a job seeker’s interests, motivation, capabilities and skills to the needs of a specific job. “Assessments expose the shortcomings in a candidate’s education, experience or skill profile while also identifying his training needs,” says Sharma.

The whole process is automated. Once the registration process is over at the HRD centre, the candidate takes an assessment and the results are updated in the ‘Candidate Life Cycle System’, thereby enabling matching of demand to supply.

The HRD centres also take up the job of counseling and other skill development initiatives.
Manipal Education CEO and MD Anand Sudarshan said “We at Manipal Education are looking forward to a long and fruitful partnership with the Karnataka Government to ensure that we provide the right jobs for the right candidate, and productive workforce for the industry.”

The existing problem in the state is not unemployment but matching capability with aspiration. The existing supply chain is fragmented and there is no one place to go for employing people.

Here in comes the role of HRD centres. “For individual jobseekers, iRize run HRD centres will assess and match their aspirations and capabilities to job market requirement and provide them with the right jobs,” said iRize Business Head Rajesh A R.

“Our endeavour is to enable self sustaining people who are assessed, counseled, trained, verified and certified across profiles and cities. We will link them with various stakeholders like government (employment exchanges, skill development programmes), educational institutes (vocational schools and colleges), assessment companies, training/recruitment companies and NGOs to cater to the manpower requirements of the organised and unorganised corporate sectors,” he said.