The Problem With Most Employability Programs

By 2022, India's vocational education ecosystem had accumulated a decade of well-funded frustration. Government skill development schemes, corporate CSR programs, and NGO-led initiatives had collectively trained millions of youth in trades and technical skills. Employment outcomes remained stubbornly inconsistent.

The cause was not the training itself. ITI graduates generally leave with competent technical skills. The gap was something else: they arrived at the employment market without knowing how to identify which roles matched their strengths, how to present themselves, or how to evaluate an opportunity against a career direction they had thought through. The technical training was sound. The career intelligence was absent.

When the CSR Foundation of a large Indian manufacturing conglomerate — we will refer to them here as the Foundation, as they have requested not to be named in public case studies — commissioned an independent review of their vocational employment programs in 2022, this finding was central. Their training-to-employment conversion rate across 31 ITI partner colleges was 54%. Placement rates at best-performing colleges touched 68%; at worst-performing, they were below 40%.

The Foundation's CSR leadership asked a pointed question: what would it take to move the system-wide rate above 70% — and keep it there?

Designing the Dheya Integration

Dheya was introduced to the Foundation through a common advisory network in early 2023. The initial scoping conversation identified the core insight that would drive the partnership design: the employment gap was not primarily a skills gap. It was a career clarity and positioning gap.

Students graduating from ITIs knew how to weld, operate CNC machines, install electrical systems, or repair refrigeration units. What they typically lacked was:

  • An understanding of which sector or role type best matched their individual strengths and working preferences
  • A sense of career trajectory beyond the first job — where could this lead over five years?
  • Preparation for the interview and selection processes of formal employers as distinct from small workshops and informal sector hiring
  • A network or relationship with anyone who had navigated the formal employment market

The Dheya model was adapted for vocational learners across four components:

1. Group RAPD Assessment. Administered to all graduating students in the final semester — a 45-minute group session with individual digital results. The RAPD assessment was adapted for lower literacy levels and made available in regional languages (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Telugu across the 47 partner colleges).

2. Group Career Orientation Sessions. A three-hour facilitated session for cohorts of 25–30 students, mapping RAPD profiles to specific job roles available in the regional labour market. Conducted by trained Dheya facilitators, with employer input incorporated into the curriculum.

3. Individual Mentoring (targeted). Students identified through RAPD as having specific placement risks — high Relational orientation entering solitary production work, Directive orientation students taking supervised technician roles without advancement pathways — received individual mentoring sessions with a trained mentor.

4. Employer Alignment Workshops. Quarterly sessions with the Foundation's 140+ employer partners, presenting aggregate RAPD insights from each college cohort to help employers understand the orientations they were hiring and how to manage for retention.

The programme was piloted across 8 colleges in Q3 2023, expanded to 31 colleges in early 2024, and reached its full 47-college footprint by mid-2024.

What the Data Showed: Pilot Phase

The eight-college pilot produced the first data point that validated the approach.

Pilot cohort: 1,847 graduating students across 8 ITI colleges (Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka). Control group: same colleges' prior-year cohort, 1,792 students, no RAPD intervention.

Six-month employment outcomes:

| Metric | Control Group (Prior Year) | Pilot Cohort | |---|---|---| | Formal sector employment rate | 52% | 67% | | Employment in role aligned to trade training | 61% of employed | 74% of employed | | Employer-reported 90-day retention | 71% | 84% | | Student-reported "confident in career direction" | 38% | 79% |

The retention number was unexpected and became one of the most compelling findings for employer partners. An 84% 90-day retention rate versus 71% in the control group represented a meaningful reduction in the recruitment costs that employers bore when new hires left quickly.

The Foundation's CSR team presented the pilot data internally and received approval to expand.

Scaling to 12,000 Students: Challenges and Adaptations

The expansion to 47 colleges and approximately 12,000 students per year (across two graduating cohorts per year, many ITI programs being one-year diplomas) required adaptations that the pilot had not anticipated.

Language and literacy. Several colleges in the expanded network, particularly in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, served students with limited Hindi literacy and varying comfort with digital interfaces. Dheya's assessment team developed audio-supported assessment formats for lower-literacy cohorts and conducted group facilitation sessions in Kannada and Telugu.

Facilitator training at scale. Deploying trained facilitators across 47 colleges in eight states required building a layer of "anchor facilitators" — Dheya-trained professionals based in each state who could manage quality across their cluster of colleges and conduct ongoing training for college staff who would eventually take over facilitation.

Employer education. The employer alignment workshops initially met resistance from some hiring managers who were sceptical of a psychometric framework in the context of vocational hiring. The adaptation was pragmatic: Dheya presented RAPD data in operational language ("your welding intake will include 30% Directive-orientation students who will be looking for advancement pathways within 18 months — here's how to structure for that") rather than psychological language. Employer engagement improved significantly.

College staff capacity. Several partner colleges had no existing career services infrastructure. The programme embedded a two-day career facilitation training into the annual college staff calendar, building institutional capacity alongside the direct student intervention.

The 18-Month Outcomes

By December 2025, the Foundation and Dheya compiled outcomes for the full 47-college programme across three graduating cohorts — approximately 12,000 students tracked.

Employment outcomes:

  • Overall formal sector employment rate: 72% (up from 54% baseline across the same colleges pre-intervention)
  • Employment in trade-aligned roles: 78% of employed students
  • 90-day retention rate: 83%
  • 12-month retention rate: 69% (a metric the Foundation had not previously tracked; industry benchmark for entry-level vocational hires is approximately 55%)

Student experience outcomes:

  • 84% of surveyed students reported the RAPD assessment gave them "useful information about the kind of work I should look for"
  • 77% reported the career orientation session was the most useful career-related experience they had in college
  • 31% of students who received individual mentoring (the targeted sub-cohort) reported changing their initial job search direction based on their RAPD results and mentoring conversation

Employer outcomes:

  • 67% of employer partners surveyed reported improved hire quality from the programme cohorts compared to prior years
  • 3 employers from the programme have since launched independent Dheya assessments for their own internal hiring processes

The Head of CSR at the Foundation, speaking at an internal stakeholder presentation, framed the result simply: "We moved from 54% to 72%. That is 2,160 more young people in formal employment this year than would have been without this programme. At an average entry-level CTC of ₹1.8 lakh per year, that represents ₹38.8 crore in additional annual income flowing into families that were not earning it before."

What Made the Difference

The Foundation's own evaluation identified three factors that distinguished this programme from prior vocational employment interventions:

Assessment before placement, not instead of it. The RAPD assessment is not a placement filter — it is an orientation tool. Every student still goes through placement. The assessment informs which placements to prioritise, how to prepare, and how to frame their strengths to employers.

Employer integration, not just student training. Most employability programmes train students in isolation from the employers who will hire them. The quarterly employer alignment workshops created a shared vocabulary and, importantly, made employers feel like partners in the outcome rather than passive recipients of trained candidates.

Measurement from the beginning. The programme was designed with outcome measurement built in from month one, not added retrospectively. This created accountability — for the colleges, for Dheya, and for the Foundation — and generated the data that drove continuous improvement across cohorts.

Designing a Career Guidance Partnership for Your CSR Programme

Corporate foundations and CSR programs that invest in vocational education and youth employability often face the same challenge the Foundation confronted: training is happening, but employment outcomes are not meeting potential.

Dheya's institutional partnership model is designed to address exactly this gap — at scale, with measurable outcomes, and with the flexibility to adapt to regional languages, varied literacy levels, and diverse employer ecosystems.

Speak to Dheya's institutional partnerships team →

The 72% outcome across 12,000 students is a benchmark, not a ceiling. It represents what is achievable when assessment, mentoring, and employer engagement are integrated from the start.