Higher Education and Future Workforce Development Potential—Mapping Indian States

With the emergence of the knowledge economy and the new age industrial transformation forged by today’s 4.0 age of digitization, graduate employability needs are changing at a pace like never before. While the industry is foreseen to be moving towards the 5.0 revolution of personalization, the uncertainties arising from the COVID-19 pandemic loom large. The two together challenge future workforce development. Therefore, the ability of the higher education sector to respond suitably to the emerging workforce requirements becomes imperative to sustain growth. Conventionally, the effectiveness of higher education in fulfilling labour market demand is assessed from the standpoint of employability, graduation rate, research, skills, etc. However, the analysis of these dimensions in silos is inadequate in signalling higher education’s overall preparedness level for workforce development. This conceptual paper makes a case for a composite index called the Higher Education Future Workforce (HEFW) Index that incorporates the three sub-dimensions of skilling and employability, research and innovation, quality and participation. The HEFW Index, with its respective sub-indicators, cumulatively signals the preparedness level of the existing higher education sector in future workforce development for the major Indian States and provides an empirical grounding for comparing inter-state variation. Furthermore, the HEFW index has been juxtaposed with growth and competitiveness ranking, respectively, to ascertain the underlying relationship between the indicators