Bengaluru: With a vision to enhance skills for employability, Microsoft announced a collaboration with the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) to provide training to more than 100,000 women in India over the next 10 months.
This initiative is an extension of Microsoft’s partnership with NSDC to provide digital skills to over 1 lakh youth in the country.
The partnership is focused on enhancing women’s workforce participation by equipping young women from rural communities with the skills required to thrive in a digital economy.
Digital literacy
As part of the collaboration, more than 70 hours of course content will be made available free of cost, covering topics such as digital literacy, enhancing employability, nano entrepreneurship and communication skills.
The programme will curate a series of live training sessions and digital skilling drives to help create opportunities for young girls and women, particularly first time job seekers and those whose jobs may have been impacted by COVID-19, to join the future workforce.
These live training sessions will be delivered online through the Microsoft Community Training (MCT) platform. The MCT platform will also allow the trainees to access rich content already available on MCT as well as providing a forum to engage with peers.
Commenting on the partnership with NSDC, Microsoft India President Anant Maheshwari said COVID-19 has accelerated India’s digital transformation and a workforce that is equipped with future-ready skills will be the key to unlocking the country’s next phase of growth.
Economic recovery
“Providing equal opportunity and access to digital skills for underserved young women will be an important part of this journey, ensuring an inclusive economic recovery. Our partnership with NSDC is aimed at bridging the gender gap in access to digital skills, enabling everyone to succeed in a digital economy,” he said.
Expressing happiness over the development, NSDC MD & CEO Dr. Manish Kumar said NSDC is nurturing a conducive ecosystem in which women across formal and informal sectors get access to appropriate skill development opportunities.
“Mainstreaming of content, delivery of training and use of digital platforms are key to increasing participation of women. Our partnership with Microsoft will help in economic empowerment of women,” Dr. Kumar added.
eSkill India
Under this partnership, eSkill India, NSDC’s digital skilling initiative, will support in building the outreach of this engagement through its skilling ecosystem which includes sector skill councils, training partners, and training centres. Microsoft and NSDC will award a joint e-certificate to participants post course completion.
Furthermore, 20,000 young women from regions with low levels of female labor force participation will be selected by NSDC and trained with dedicated skills under an employability training program for employment in IT/IT enabled job roles.
The partnership with NSDC is an extension of Microsoft’s global skilling initiative to help 25 million people worldwide acquire new digital skills needed for the COVID-19 economy and part of Microsoft India’s ongoing commitment to support young women for a career in technology.
eSkill India is a digital skilling initiative from NSDC that aggregates digital learning resources through various Indian and global knowledge partnerships, to enable access to best-in-class learning resources for the youth of India.
Technology and skills
Currently, over 1.68 million minutes of digital courses and content are available across various sectors in multiple languages, providing learners with the technology and skills needed to prosper in a rapidly transforming digital world.
NSDC, working under the aegis of the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, is a unique public-private-partnership which aims to catalyze creation of quality vocational training ecosystem in India.
Since inception in 2010, NSDC has trained more than 2.5 crore people through its partnership with 600+ training partners, 11,000+ training centers spread over 600+ districts across the country.
NSDC has established 37 Sector Skill Councils and is implementing Government’s flagship skill development schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Kendra (PMKK), National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS), among others.
Intelligent cloud
Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge.
Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Microsoft set up its India operations in 1990. Today, Microsoft entities in India have over 11,000 employees, engaged in sales and marketing, research, development and customer services and support, across 11 Indian cities – Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, New Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune.
US-headquartered Microsoft offers its global cloud services from local data centers to accelerate digital transformation across Indian startups, businesses, and government organizations.
This article first appeared in the NFA Post and is republished with permission.