FutureX-Future of Work Skills Program

Scores of first time job seeking youth in India, mainly from the underserved socio-economic communities, face problems in finding desirable jobs due to the lack of professional guidance, job readiness skills and connect with employment. 

FutureX is an AI based technology led employment linked blended learning program that empowers youth with the requisite 21st century skills as sought after by industry, along with skills for self development. 

The programme uses a blend of self learning, synchronous mentor chats using mobile along with face to face learning to effectively deliver a holistic learning experience. This approach enables the programme to scale and address the needs of the large youth base while further reducing cost by 50% from the brick and mortar model. 

The programme, post training, connects youth with sustainable jobs and facilitates continuity in employment thus making them financially independent and helping their families move out of poverty. 

In India, 600 million young people are living below the poverty line and the number of unemployed young people in India is 29.5 million. Currently India enjoys the highest youth base across the globe but if not skilled and made productive this could be detrimental to the society and the nation at large. Youth, especially those who come from underserved communities need some handholding in terms of their improving employability skills.
Landing a job that fits their skillset and matches their area of interest has become a daunting task for the youth. 

The situation being far worse for women where they do not have access to resources and opportunities that their male counterparts would. Furthermore, abysmal socio-economic conditions compound the problems women face wherein they’re often married off early and denied the opportunity to complete their education or pursue a career. Also, in times of distress, such as the Covid pandemic, young women are one of the most affected demographic groups indicated by the drop in women participation to around 15% at present versus the 30% participation of women in workforce at the start of 2011. 

The available brick and mortar solutions in India have not been able to skill and connect the large youth base with available job opportunities. With no tested solution to implement at scale currently available, FutureX programme with the use of AI based technology can be scaled to meet the increasing demands and connect youth with employment opportunity. 

Magic Bus works with young people mainly from the underserved communities, living in poverty, in India, taking them from a life full of challenges to a life with meaningful livelihoods. 

Young people on the Magic Bus program successfully fend off destabilizers such as child marriage, child labor, discontinuation of education, etc. Some of them complete their secondary education and go on to become first-generation salary earners having secure careers in the organized sector. We serve young men and women in the age group of 18 to 25 years from underprivileged families with a family income of less than INR 0.24 million per annum or even less due to Covid induced economic stress. 

Youth in our program, a large segment being young girls in the same age group, get trained on life & employability skills that also includes being gender sensitive, building a strong psycho social system and skills to help them manage interactions with self and members around them. 

During the process we engage with the community, individual families, and train young people using the blended approach followed by a continuous engagement post placement to ensure and enable them settle in their jobs and retain it thus moving their families out of poverty.

Through our program young people from the underserved communities are empowered with the requisite 21st century skills, placing them in sustainable jobs in the formal sector and thus helping their families move out of poverty.

The problem that we are addressing, the solution that is designed and the target population is very well aligned with the challenge 'Future of Work in India'. 

As stated earlier the challenges that our solution is trying to address viz. helping youth from marginalised sections get skilled and get connected with employment, help more women get trained and pick up employment opportunities, post placement support to help retain employment thus become financially independent so that the families come out of poverty. 

During the process we connect youth with the requisite 21st century skills that are required in the current Covid impacted situation as well as post covid era of digitally enabled work environment that calls for more transferable skills along with digital skills that will keep the youth of today more relevant and productive. To name a few our training focuses on making the youth a better communicator, being a better problem solver, being adaptable, taking personal leadership, being more customer focused, having good work place ethics, digital literacy and spoken English. 

This results in more empowered financially independent youth with sustainable careers, women with careers and employers get well trained youth. 

Mr. Arun Nalavadi

Executive Director - Sustainability & Partnerships

email id - arun_n@magicbusindia.org

mobile no. - +91 99303 14770

The key innovation of our solution is it is an Immersive Blended Learning experience to impart life skills to youth from underserved communities making them employable and self reliant. These life skills are critical to their success at work and staying employed. Conventionally, life skill development is a high human touchpoint approach where technology has a lesser role to play in developing these skills. We have successfully moved from an everyday, in class touchpoint, to a once a week in class touch point and use a Goal focused AI chatbot to enhance and enable greater understanding, learning and demonstration of life skill by the youth. Our unique goal based chatbot builds upon the single session that the youth attend to focus their imbibing the skill. We additionally support the youth on a 1:1 chat basis for any clarifications / queries that they may have. Typically, life skills are taught with a high human touch point that inhibits the scale of imparting this skills to the millions of youth who need it in India. As our model is blended it has the strong potential to scale and provide disruptive effective solution. In the process we have also disproved the myth of the underprivileged youth not being able to self learn where the program runs on a self learn to instructor led learning of 60:40.   

Our solution while being blended in nature runs on the core technology of conversational AI on an App. While conversational AI has been around for a while, our platform uses a proprietary coaching framework to drive these conversations and uses it to extend learning beyond the classroom. The proprietary coaching pedagogy that we use also enables us to rapidly scale our conversations to suit what will be needed as program matures. Leveraging the benefits of the cloud, we are able to scale the platform as per the demands of the user base to provide a seamless experience. The technology has been curated with strong domain expertise to maximise the way the conversations will enable the user to assimilate the desired life skills and create user personalisation. This enables us to create curriculum suited to different user needs rapidly and can be deployed on scale. With this technology platform we are able to create a strong case of the user being more invested in self learning and enables the learning process to be nonlinear and asynchronous. The technology also gives us a clear insight into the strengths and aspirations of the youth and the nature of their challenges that enable us to improve personalisation. We recognise that learning can only improve with vernacular offerings and are actively working to integrate multiple languages as a part of our solution. 

The FutureX program seeks to solve the problems of mass life and employability skills for India. We are expecting to achieve this on account of being able to scale this program initially to a 5X model and then to a much larger scale as we transition into a more digital mode. Life skilling and employability skilling requires a continuous engagement with the target audience to ensure that they are able to build those skills and at the same time be able to support them in their endeavors. This continuous engagement is built on being accessible and connected to the challenges and aspirations of the youth apart from supporting them to overcome the challenges that they face. Our solution has multiple digital touchpoints which helps the youth with these endeavors and can scale to become a gamechanger in skill being the basis of their development. Our pilot program was audited by an accredited tool, the LSAS (Life Skill Assessment Scale) that seeks to look at how much change has taken place in the youth on the core life skills of Verbal Communication, Teamwork, Taking Initiative, Managing Conflict and Interacting With Others. The change across the board for the program has been at 0.83 which rates as being a significant improvement across the LSAS spectrum. We have had youth get placed in prestigious white collar organizations in good career growth positions as a part of this program.

Magic Bus has been impacting the lives of children and young people since 1999 and will continue to transform the lives of 1 million young men and women from the marginalised sections in the next 5 years, have more girls and women join the employment market and continue employment, improvement in family income through the skilled and employed youths thus helping their families move out of poverty, better career progression for skilled and employed youth. Magic Bus will continue to directly implement the programmes and will bring in expert knowledge and technical partners wherever required.

The indicators used to measure progress and impact include number of youth enrolled, graduated, placed in jobs, retained in jobs, market linked salaries, equal participation of men and women, career progression in year 1, 2 & 3, asset creation, improvement in family income status thus aligning our goals to the UN Sustainibility Goals viz,  No Poverty’ (SDG No. 1), Gender Equality (SDG No. 5), and  Decent work & Economic growth (SDG No. 8)