I spent most of my time at Ashoka University hating the core courses I had to do for my Economics major. Memorising derivations and learning how to calculate the slopes of different curves stressed me out to no end. I didn’t love what I was doing until I took electives in my third and fourth year which all ended up being policy centric: health economics, gender economics, political economy, behavioural science etc. I think that is when I peaked academically and actually started to enjoy both the courses I was taking and the long hours I had to spend studying for them. The final nudge towards entering the impact space came from taking a course called ‘Social Impact and Entrepreneurship’ that exposed me to the world of impact outside of NGOs and philanthropies. With a final project that went really well, I started to think this is where I belong.
So on my first day in GDi Partners, I walked into the office with the kind of excitement that only a fresher can have, while having no real sense of how a government programme actually gets built and I have spent the last twelve months finding out exactly that. I joined Mission SKILL, Jammu & Kashmir Department of Skill Development’s initiative to rethink how the region trains, deploys, and grows its workforce. For the purpose of this blog, I will split my journey into 4 categories, very similar to the ones we learn in college when we start doing case prep for the very first time: the why, the what, the how and the who.
My preliminary task was what I expected: unglamorous and tedious. I had to pull together institute-level data and scheme-level data from across J&K to understand what the skilling landscape actually looked like and why we needed interventions in place. Not based on any assumptions, not what stakeholders told me it looks like, not what it was supposed to look like, but what it actually was, in each institute and district.
This is where I learned the first lesson every fresher eventually learns the hard way: the instinct to start with a solution is almost always premature.
It's definitely tempting, especially early in your career, to arrive with a framework already in mind and go looking for data to fit perfectly into it. But my project forced my thinking in the opposite direction. Before I could even sit with a whiteboard and start drawing my framework, I had to sit with rows of enrolment numbers, dropout rates, sector-wise bifurcations and look for missing data points long enough to let a picture emerge on its own. Some of the data analysis confirmed what I was already assuming and a lot of it surprised me. Either way, the data became the starting point, not the supporting evidence.
Once the larger picture was clear, the ‘harder’ work began, which was turning an understanding of the problem into frameworks for actual intervention. This is the part of the job that looks the most like ‘policy work’ from the outside, and it's also where I understood the differences between problem-solving and problem-describing.
It is one thing to identify that a skilling ecosystem is fragmented or that certain districts are underserved by certain trades. It is another to design an intervention that a government department can consistently and uniformly implement across institutes and schemes, while still managing to meet their specific requirements.
I learned how to build frameworks that didn't just make the gaps more salient to us but actually proposed a sequenced way to close it, because a diagnosis without a mechanism isn't useful to anyone sitting at the decision-making table with a limited budget and a large target.
Hence, came the 4 pillar framework for Mission SKILL:
These pillars were planned to be operationalized through Shaping Curriculum, Equipping Manpower, Enhancing Infrastructure, Driving Governance (SEED Framework).
A cross-cutting layer of Ecosystem Enablers was imagined to anchor convergence across government departments, industry, training providers, and community partners to connect skills with real opportunities and drive sustained impact.
However, the stage I am in now is one that is equally nerve-wrecking as it is rewarding. When we are creating any on-ground implementation tools that will actually carry this from a policy document into people's lives and integrate with the existing system, everything I have thought of and developed will be put to a test.
This is a different kind of problem-solving than anything earlier in the past year.
Data analysis and framework design reward rigor and thinking outside the box, whereas building for rollout rewards humility.
No matter how carefully you design a tool sitting at a desk, the field will find the edge case you didn't think of. I am learning how to build with that in mind: simpler defaults, fewer assumptions about the capabilities of the system we are working with, more room for something to go wrong without the whole system breaking down. It definitely feels uncomfortable to hand off something you know has not yet been stress-tested by reality. It is also, I think, the only way anything gets done at all.
This stage also taught me something I don't think I could have learned any other way: a good idea and a do-able idea are not automatically the same thing, and the work of a good consultant is to stop thinking of the existing gaps as constraints and work them into solutioning itself.
Running alongside all of this has been a quieter, yet significant thread of work: creating job-skill linkages and archetypes. The idea is that Mission SKILL should not just simply target "youth" or "the unemployed" as an undifferentiated masses, but should create specific, recognisable profiles of people with different starting points, different calibre, different ambitions and different realistic pathways forward.
A major share of Jammu & Kashmir's population today falls in the productive 18-39 age group — 41.23 lakh people. Of these, 21.90 lakh are employed, 6.85 lakh are in education, 4.32 lakh are unemployed but willing to work, and 8.14 lakh are outside the labour force. More than 12 lakh individuals fall into the category of NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) which captures individuals who are outside the formal education system, not engaged in any form of employment—whether wage-based or self-employment—and not participating in skill development or vocational training.
This turned out to be the work that changed how I think the most. It's easy, especially as a fresher, to design for an average person who may or may not actually exist, but fits our vision.
Building archetypes is forcing me to ask sharper questions: who is this intervention actually for, what do they already have, what do they want and what is the smallest, most realistic next step for them specifically?
Mapping job-skill linkages against these archetypes rather than against a generic target audience is making every decision that needs to be made, which trades to prioritise, where is the maximum scope for employment or entrepreneurship, more honest and viable.
If there is something I would tell a fresher, walking into their first consulting job, especially in the impact space, it would be this: be willing to change your mind at every stage. The data should change your assumptions, the constraints should aid your solution framework, the field should modify your tools. Most importantly, the people you're actually trying to reach should change how you define them in the first place.
A year in, Mission SKILL has not given me a lot of complete answers. But it has definitely taught me how to keep asking better questions.
