E-Paper
Govt to change job exchanges to career centres
The central government is all set to restructure the defunct employment exchanges of the country and turn them into career centres on the lines of online job portals like naukri.com and timesjob.com, likely from next month.
The central government is all set to restructure the defunct employment exchanges of the country and turn them into career centres on the lines of online job portals like naukri.com and timesjob.com, likely from next month.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley in his maiden budget speech in June had spoken about restructuring the 956 exchanges that have more than four crore registered job seekers but a very low placement record.
As a first step towards their modernisation, all exchanges will be linked via web based computer system creating a virtual job market for employers and job seekers.
The access and use of the portal would be easy and user friendly and jobseekers will be able to upload their biodata on the portal through common service centres or kiosks.
The government is considering setting up such kiosks at every technical/professional institutes so that students can easily use them.
The employment exchanges would also launch training programmes for skill development of job seekers in the PPP ( Public Private Partnership) mode with government likely to provide subsidy for both the trainees and training providers.
Recruitment through local employment exchanges would be encouraged by offering incentives for the employers like tax exemptions.
According to the ministry of labour and employment, the problem behind the poor performance of these exchanges is lack of information regarding the demand and supply of the labour market.
The employment market information system run by the exchanges is ineffective in most of the states with delayed publication of employment market report.
Again, most of the candidate registered with the exchanges are unskilled with no academic or technical qualifications.
The success rate of these exchanges in respect of placement, the ministry noted, is below 0.5 % as compared to a leading online job website that claims to place 10-15 % of the total jobseekers registered with it.
