By Jay Prakash Pandey “Pahadi”
There was a time when finding the first job was difficult, but the road to it was still visible.
A young person leaving college knew roughly where to look. There were clerical jobs in banks, junior positions in offices, sales jobs, factory work, bookkeeping, supervisory roles and other entry-level opportunities. One did not always need a specialised degree or a long list of technical skills. A little training, some patience and the willingness to learn were often enough to make a beginning.
The salary may have been modest, but the first step was possible. That first step has now become harder. The problem is not simply that more young people are looking for jobs. The nature of work itself is changing. Many of the jobs through which young people once entered the labour market are either shrinking or taking a new form.
The International Labour Organization’s Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026 report says that global youth unemployment stood at 12.4 per cent in 2025. The number is serious, but another change is taking place quietly behind it: the old structure of employment is slowly disappearing. We can see it in ordinary life.
Not very long ago, a visit to a bank meant several counters and several employees. Someone updated passbooks, someone handled routine queries, someone dealt with transactions. Railway tickets meant standing in a queue. Electricity and water bills were deposited at separate counters. Today, much of this work fits inside a mobile phone.
The same change is visible in offices. Data entry, routine accounting, customer support and many administrative tasks now require fewer people than before. Technology has not entered the workplace with a loud announcement. It has simply begun doing more of the work.
Artificial intelligence may push this change further.
Whenever AI is discussed, the first question usually is: how many jobs will it take away? But perhaps there is another question that matters even more: how many young people are being prepared for the jobs that will remain, or the new ones that will appear?
Take a simple example. Suppose an office once needed ten people to manage records, billing and routine data. A new digital system may now allow the same work to be done by two trained employees. For the company, this is efficiency. For the other eight people, it is uncertainty. We may say that new jobs are being created in data analysis, cybersecurity, digital operations and AI-enabled services. That is true. But someone who has spent years doing routine office work cannot become a data analyst the next morning.
There is a distance between an old job and a new skill. That distance has to be crossed through training, opportunity and time.
For India, this question is especially important because every year a very large number of young people enter the labour market. We often take pride in calling India a young country. And it is an advantage. But youth by itself is not an economic strength. It becomes a strength only when young people have the skills, opportunities and confidence to participate in a changing economy.
In 2025, unemployment among Indians aged 15 to 29 stood at 9.9 per cent. In urban areas, it was 13.6 per cent. Nearly one-fourth of young people in this age group were neither working, studying nor receiving any training. At the same time, only around five per cent had received formal vocational or technical training.
These numbers tell a simple story. India does not have a shortage of young people. It has a shortage of pathways. For years, a college degree was seen as one such pathway.
In many Indian families, a BA, BCom or BSc carried a quiet promise. Finish college, and sooner or later, a respectable job will come. That promise was never guaranteed, but it carried some truth. Today, a degree alone carries less certainty.
An employer does not only ask, “What have you studied?” The next question is often more important: “What can you actually do?” This is where the gap between education and employment becomes visible.
Companies say they cannot find enough trained people. At the same time, lakhs of educated young people say they cannot find suitable jobs. Both statements can be true at the same time. The problem lies in the space between education and actual work. We teach one thing. The market often asks for another. The rise of the gig economy has provided one answer, though not a complete one. Delivery work, app-based taxis, home services and digital platforms have given millions of people a way to earn. That opportunity matters, especially for someone who needs an income immediately.
But earning today and building a future are not always the same thing.
If a young person works for eight or ten years and still has the same insecurity, nearly the same income and no major improvement in skills, we need to ask whether that work has truly helped him move forward. A job should ideally do more than pay this month’s bills. It should also create some possibility for the next five years.
This is why India needs to pay more attention to the large middle layer of employment.
Not every young person will become a doctor, engineer, software developer or data scientist. Nor can an economy run only on low-skilled work. Between the two lies a huge world of jobs: technicians, machine operators, supervisors, trained sales workers, healthcare assistants, office staff, maintenance workers and skilled workers in dozens of service sectors.
These may not always sound glamorous, but they are the jobs on which a strong middle class is often built. India needs many more of them.
This also means that skill development cannot remain a game of numbers. Opening training centres and distributing certificates is easy to count. What matters is what happens after the training.
Did the young person get a job? Did the salary improve? Did the skill remain useful after one year? Or did the certificate simply join a degree in a folder at home? That should be the real test.
ITIs, polytechnics and universities need much closer links with industries. Apprenticeships should become a normal bridge between the classroom and the workplace, not just a formality at the end of a course. There is still enormous employment potential in manufacturing, tourism, healthcare, food processing, construction, electronics, renewable energy and MSMEs. Many of these sectors can offer work to ordinary young people after a few months of serious, practical training.
The same principle applies to artificial intelligence. The answer to AI cannot be fear. It has to be familiarity. In the coming years, the biggest divide may not be between humans and machines. It may be between people who know how to use new technology and those who never got the chance to learn it.
There are some positive signs as well. In 2025, the share of regular salaried employment rose to 23.6 per cent. The share of workers in manufacturing also increased from 11.6 per cent to 12.1 per cent.
So the story is not one of hopelessness. It is a story of transition. And transitions are uncomfortable because the old road begins to disappear before the new road becomes fully visible. India’s real challenge is to make sure that its young people are not left standing somewhere in between. We often ask how many jobs have been created. We should continue asking that question. But perhaps we need to add one more.
If a young person gets a job today, where will that job take him or her five or ten years from now? Because the future of India’s young population will not be decided only by whether they find work. It will be decided by whether that work gives them a way forward.
(The author is an Uttarakhand-based independent writer, poet and social activist.)
