The missing bridge between college and a first job in India

For many young Indians, the period between college and a first structured job is filled by gig work rather than formal training. In today's YOUR INDIA column, Santosh Nair looks at apprenticeships, stipends and why the organised path from education to employment remains difficult to choose.

A young graduate finishes college with a certificate, a modest résumé and no clear next step. For a while, they deliver food on a rented bike, earning enough to get by, while quietly still hoping for something closer to what they actually studied.

This gap, between finishing education and finding real, structured work, is one of the least discussed stretches of an Indian young person’s life, even though millions pass through it every year.

In many countries, this gap is treated as something to be formally designed, not left to chance. Germany runs one of the most well-known systems for this, a “dual” apprenticeship model, where young people split their time between a classroom and a real workplace, earning a wage while they train. As of recent records, close to 1.3 million people were enrolled as apprentices in Germany, a country of roughly 83 million people, meaning apprentices make up around one and a half per cent of the entire population.

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