The world of work is being redrawn faster than most institutions can respond to, and nowhere is this more visible than across the BRICS economies. Together, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the bloc’s newer members represent a vast portion of the global workforce, yet they face a common vulnerability: skills systems that were not built for the pace of today’s technological change. That shared vulnerability is now producing a shared response, and India’s chairship of BRICS in 2026 has placed it at the centre of the conversation.

Over the past few months, the BRICS labour and education tracks have moved from dialogue to architecture. The Employment Working Group’s meeting in Thiruvananthapuram earlier this year identified skills mapping as a priority, and that groundwork culminated at the 12th BRICS Labour and Employment Ministers’ Meeting in Hyderabad, where member states adopted a declaration launching BRICS CONNECT, a cooperation network for capacity building, employability. and new skills and technologies. Structured around four pillars — social security, women’s workforce participation, skills and employability, and digital public infrastructure — the network is deliberately voluntary and nonbinding, designed to let countries share what works rather than impose a single template. Notably, the Hyderabad meetings also took delegations into industry facilities to examine AI, future-ready skilling, and workplace transformation firsthand, an acknowledgement that policy dialogue alone will not close the gap.

The education ministries have moved in parallel. At the BRICS Education Ministers’ Meeting in Bhubaneswar, member countries advanced proposals under the BRICS TVET Cooperation Alliance, including a coordinated skill-gap study to map emerging occupations, a cross-border skills competition, and a compendium of good practices spanning industry partnerships, digital learning, and financing models. Taken together, these initiatives point to one conclusion: No BRICS economy believes it can solve its skills gap in isolation, and every one of them is betting on closer, more structural collaboration between industry and academia to do it.

For India, this is not a new instinct but an intensifying one. A white paper by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) on skills and technology shortages in BRICS notes that India’s demographic dividend, with more than 65% of its population under 35, is a genuine strategic asset, but only if matched by timely, relevant training. The country’s approach already reflects that logic: The National Education Policy 2020 and Skill India Mission sit alongside more than 15,000 Industrial Training Institutes being upgraded with AI, robotics, IoT and cybersecurity curricula, and industry-run programmes, from Tata STRIVE to Infosys Springboard, which have built direct pipelines between classrooms and employers. The scale of the challenge is real. In fact, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report projects that nearly two-thirds of Indian workers will need to upskill by 2030, even as Indian employers already report the world’s second-highest demand for AI and big data talent.
This is precisely where finance and accounting functions cannot afford to sit on the sidelines. As enterprises embed automation, AI-driven analytics, and real-time reporting into core operations, the competencies expected of management accounting and finance professionals are shifting as fast as those in engineering or IT. Certification bodies, employers, and universities each hold a piece of the solution, but only sustained collaboration between them, including curricula co-designed with industry, credentials that travel across borders, and continuous professional education tied to actual workplace demand, will keep talent pipelines aligned with where finance work is actually heading.

The proposals now on the table, from a BRICS skills passport for cross-border credential recognition to shared training platforms and joint skill-gap studies, are ambitious, and their success will depend on execution rather than declarations. But the direction is unmistakable. Industry-academia collaboration is no longer a supplementary talking point in workforce planning; it is the mechanism through which BRICS economies, India foremost among them, intend to convert demographic scale into durable economic advantage. Institutions that treat this as a shared, ongoing responsibility, rather than a one-time curriculum update, will be the ones that shape the workforce the next decade actually needs.

Views expressed are personal

The author, Arindam Ghosh, is Head – India & South Asia, IMA

Share on Facebook

Post on X

Follow us

Save