Degrees vs Skills: What Will Define Employability in the Future of Work?
India’s workforce of 2047 will not be built by choosing between academic credentials and practical capability, but by combining degrees with demonstrable skills, continuous learning and deeper industry–academia collaboration, Future of Work.
“Hunar ko na dekha” … the extract of the song from the movie Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na calls out what is relevant than ever. A degree was the clearest shorthand for employability, signalling that a candidate had studied a discipline, met an academic standard and possessed the foundation to begin a career. That signal still matters, but it is no longer sufficient on its own.
Ask any HR leader what makes someone employable today and the conversation rarely ends with the name of a university or the qualification on a CV. It moves to a different set of questions. What can this person actually do? Can they solve a problem they have not encountered before? Can they use technology intelligently rather than mechanically? Can they work with people, absorb feedback, can they work in ambiguity, can they make quick decisions with imperfect information and learn something new when the role demands it?
This change in the conversation tells us something important about the future of work. We often, wrongly, frame it as a battle of degrees versus skills, but that is an unnecessarily binary view of employability. India does not need to choose between educated people and skilled people. It needs people who are both. A degree continues to serve an important purpose. It gives learners conceptual foundations, exposure to a discipline and the ability to question, analyse and understand a subject beyond its immediate application. Skills answer a different question, whether that knowledge can be translated into performance. Increasingly, employers want evidence of both. Capability with credibility is the anchor that everyone is talking about.
The nature of work is changing too quickly for employability to be defined by what someone learnt once. Artificial intelligence, automation, data-led decision-making and new business models are changing not only jobs, but also the tasks within them. Today the generation is born into AI, hence it is fair to assume that they will bring AI literacy, however how they work with AI for impact is what will make them employable.
The World Economic Forum had estimated that 39 per cent of workers’ existing skills will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. The same report found that 30 per cent of employers in India see removing degree requirements and adopting skills-based hiring as one way of expanding their talent pool, against 19 per cent globally. Skills-first hiring can uncover talent that conventional filters overlook, but degrees are not disappearing. The study also found that 43 per cent of employers still expect to use a university degree as a hiring requirement by 2030, while work experience and direct skills assessments are gaining weight.
This does not mean we are heading towards a “degree-less” economy. The more useful question is what a degree must now be accompanied by. LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index found that 60 per cent of professionals in India still consider a university degree necessary for a successful career, while the platform estimates that skills-first hiring could expand talent pools in India by 11.4 times. Degrees retain value, while the market increasingly asks for stronger evidence of current capability.
That distinction is important for India because our challenge is not simply to educate more people; it is to convert education into productive participation. Mercer’s India’s Graduate Skill Index 2025 found that 42.6 per cent of Indian graduates applying for jobs were overall employable, while 46.1 per cent were job-ready for AI and machine-learning roles. The Economic Survey 2024–25 also highlighted the mismatch between educational attainment and occupational skill, observing that more than half of graduates were employed in roles below their educational qualifications.
From Qualification to Proof
I was leading a panel recently and asked academicians if they can show application of learning. That is the one thing all employers would want. For learners, this changes what it means to be job-ready. Employability increasingly depends on whether that person can use knowledge to solve a problem. India is already seeing this philosophy enter the education and skilling ecosystem. For years, we have treated examination results and certificates as evidence that learning has happened. They remain useful, but employers now have many more ways to see learning in action. Hackathons, live projects, case challenges, simulations, apprenticeships, portfolios and work samples allow candidates to show how they think, not merely what they know. This is where the “degree plus skills” model starts becoming tangible rather than rhetorical.
This matters even more today than ever. Managers who never expected to work with AI will need enough understanding to make decisions around it. But this does not make degrees irrelevant or weaken the value of education. Engineering, medicine, finance, law, management and many other disciplines depend on depth, sequence and foundational understanding. Even in fields where formal degree requirements are becoming more flexible, structured education can give a learner something that a collection of short courses may not: an integrated way of understanding a subject.
The real issue is that a degree can no longer carry a professional through an entire career unchanged. Someone graduating today may work for four decades, during which technologies, business models and entire categories of tasks will change. The same person may move from an individual contributor role to a managerial one, from operations to analytics or from a traditional function into an AI-enabled version of it. Education, therefore, has to continue after graduation.
EdTech’s distinct role
Its strongest proposition is not replacing the university but making upskilling and reskilling possible when learners need them. A working professional can build expertise in AI, data, digital transformation, product, finance or leadership without necessarily stepping out of a career for several years. Certifications, shorter programmes and micro-credentials can become additions to an existing educational foundation rather than alternatives to one.
Indian education policy is increasingly integrating skills with higher education. The UGC’s 2025 Apprenticeship Embedded Degree Programme guidelines formally bring workplace learning into degree education. Between 2021 and 2026, the National Apprenticeship Training Scheme provided on-the-job training to 17.22 lakh apprentices, while 457 MoUs have been signed with higher education institutions to implement apprenticeship-embedded degree programmes.
Course Curriculum Correction
The curriculum is outdated and not geared to handle the reality of today. Many students walk in this into a corporate and start feeling delusional. Education and work are increasingly overlapping and curricula must evolve accordingly. Industry cannot seek job-ready graduates if it engages only at the placement stage, while academia cannot anticipate emerging roles without sustained exposure to changing workplace requirements.
Curriculum revision therefore needs continuous industry participation without compromising academic foundations. Academia should provide depth; industry should provide currency. UGC’s academia–industry framework reflects this approach by enabling industry participation in academic bodies, Professors of Practice and jointly designed programmes. The eventual model should be a tripartite partnership between students, industry and academia, with EdTech connecting the three through learning journeys that combine academic rigour, practitioner insight and workplace application.
The same thinking can make HR creative about talent. We have spent years trying to hire the “100% fit” candidate, someone with the precise degree, number of years of experience, technical tools and sector exposure listed in a job description. In fast-changing roles, that candidate may be scarce, expensive or simply may not exist in sufficient numbers.
A better question for HR is: what must somebody know before joining and what can we teach after we hire them?
Hire–Train–Deploy
Though an old but sure shot mechanism to get relevant talent, Hire-Train-Deploy works like a sweetener. For HR teams, this creates an opportunity to rethink hiring itself. Instead of searching endlessly for candidates who already match every specification, organisations can identify people with the right foundations, aptitude and learning agility and then use a Hire–Train–Deploy model to build the exact capabilities required for a defined role. When employers help shape the curriculum, participate in assessment and create a clear deployment pathway, training moves closer to workforce planning. When the role, learning journey and deployment are designed together, Hire–Train–Deploy can come far closer to the high-confidence, almost “guaranteed success” model employers seek than conventional hire-first-and-hope approaches.
NITI Aayog’s Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat@2047 signals a decisive shift towards skills-based hiring, industry-backed learning, work-integrated degrees, micro-credentials and verifiable skills. More importantly, it shifts the focus from training volumes to what learning actually enables in employment and career progression.
For EdTech, this creates a clear responsibility that combines academic rigour with industry relevance through credible credentials, current curricula and formats that working professionals can realistically pursue. Its value will increasingly lie not in distributing content, but in converting learning into demonstrable capability.
By 2047, India will need an employability system in which people can move continuously between learning and work. Degrees, apprenticeships, specialised credentials and leadership education will increasingly form a career-long portfolio. Reskilling, therefore, must become normal career infrastructure rather than a response reserved for roles at risk of disappearing.
The future, therefore, is not Degree vs Skills. Degrees build foundations, credibility and the capacity to understand a field in depth. Skills demonstrate relevance, application and readiness for the work that exists now. One gives a professional a base; the other keeps that base current.
A degree may get you a foot in the door, but skill will determine whether you can stay, grow and lead. For India’s workforce, the winning formula is not degree or skill. It is Degree + Skills — backed by proof, strengthened through application and renewed throughout a working life. If we can build that culture across schools, universities, employers and lifelong-learning platforms, India will not merely have a large workforce in 2047. It will have a workforce capable of adapting, solving and leading. For further insights into the evolving workplace paradigm, visit
- Degrees vs Skills: What Will Define Employability in the Future of Work? - August 24, 2026
