The Skills Passport: Enabling Mobility, Ensuring Retention

As India’s automotive industry transitions toward electric mobility and intelligent systems, it is projected to double in size by 2030, potentially generating millions of new jobs. Yet a clear execution gap threatens this growth. Modern shopfloors increasingly demand advanced, job-ready technical capabilities, but employability remains uneven. One recent industry-linked estimate suggests only 57.44% of B.E. and B.Tech graduates are employable in the automotive sector.

To bridge this deficit, government initiatives such as the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS), now implemented as PM-NAPS, have opened vital pathways for non-graduates and school dropouts to enter formal work through an “earn while you learn” model. This is particularly transformative for women, who are seeing a multifold increase in demand for apprentice roles in electronics and EV manufacturing, despite historical barriers to technical training. 

Yet, entering the industry is only half the battle. Post-training placement and, crucially, redeployment remain persistent challenges across India. When competencies are not recognised in a standard, portable way, even trained apprentices struggle to translate experience into progression. For senior executives, this creates an unsustainable cycle of training investment that fails to yield a stable, industry-ready talent pipeline.

NAPS: Impact, Extension, and the Gender Friction Point

PM-NAPS has become a major pillar of India’s skilling ecosystem. As of 19 May 2025, over 43.47 lakh apprentices had been engaged across 36 States and Union Territories, with participation from more than 51,000 establishments. NAPS 2.0 set a target to enrol 46 lakh apprentices over FY 2022–23 to FY 2025–26. To strengthen uptake and reduce dropouts, the Central Apprenticeship Council has recommended a stipend increase of about 36%, alongside periodic revisions linked to inflation.

Despite its reach, outcomes are often constrained by a one-size-fits-all design that does not account for different learner constraints. Curricula can remain misaligned with modern shopfloor systems, leaving trainees underprepared for real roles. The gap is particularly costly for women, whose retention depends on enabling infrastructure and support systems that are often missing or inconsistent – safe transport, crèche facilities, access to mentors, and accessible training environments.

Apprenticeships may bridge education and work; nearly 79% of apprentices reportedly secure wage employment shortly after training, but the bridge often ends at entry. Without a standard, portable way to verify competencies across employers, workers reset to entry roles, and businesses remain stuck in repeated hiring and retraining cycles for the same baseline skills.

The Skills Passport: A Strategic Roadmap for Workforce Sustainability

A Skills Passport offers a feasible, scalable way to address this broken link in the talent pipeline. Designed as a verified, at-a-glance record of a worker’s shopfloor journey, it captures the core skills built, training completed, and performance over time in a format that works for both recruiters and candidates. Most importantly, it shifts recognition from participation to demonstrated capability – so shopfloor experience becomes a documented, portable asset.

A strong Skills Passport must include:

• Work experience: plant, department, role exposure, and tenure

• Evaluation matrix: tasks undertaken and competency level achieved.

• Skills and training completed: functional and behavioural training logged during tenure

• Performance record and achievements: safety and quality record, recognitions, certifications, and additional training completed

• Future opportunities: roles the worker is prepared to take up next, based on verified competency

This structure can reduce hiring friction and improve job matching across manufacturers. It also supports more objective appraisal and clearer progression pathways, which matters for women who face bias and inconsistent evaluation at the point of redeployment. Preserving verified skills through tenure breaks, it can help women return to work without being treated as beginners or forced into a full reset.

To be practical at scale, implementation should remain lightweight: simple supervisor inputs, clear and universal language, and formats that work in both printable and digital form. Over time, the model can be strengthened through induction sessions for trainees, mentorship support, career guidance, and basic placement preparation. 

The Gender Champions Consortium (GCC) is currently exploring these mobility tools to strengthen recognition and career progression for women workers in the automotive ecosystem. This approach also aligns with international practice; in New Zealand, MITO supports industry training and NZQA-approved micro-credentials that help clarify pathways over time.

Conclusion

For the automotive industry to thrive amid global realignment, leaders will need to move from isolated skilling pilots to system-level solutions. A Skills Passport can directly address the attrition and redeployment challenge by turning short-term apprenticeships into credible stepping stones for long-term career advancement. For manufacturers, this is not only a worker mobility intervention, but also a pathway to a more reliable, industry-ready workforce.

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