Degrees Still Matter. Skills Matter More
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Walk into any college in India and ask students what they are doing other than the college degree. A surprising number will tell you about a course they are running alongside their degree — a certification in data analytics, a bootcamp in full stack development, a short programme in digital marketing they found on educational sites like Swayam, Coursera or Udemy.
They are not doing this for fun. They are doing this because they have looked at the job market and drawn a fairly clear conclusion: a degree alone is not going to be enough.
That feeling is backed by numbers. India’s employability rate stands at 56.35 per cent according to the India Skills Report 2026, which surveyed over one lakh candidates and a thousand employers. More than half the country’s graduates are considered employable — which also means nearly half are not, at least not immediately. Employers in that same report flagged AI-related skills as among the top things they are looking for and not finding in enough candidates.
Students have noticed.
India now has over 31 million learners on Coursera alone — the largest base of any country. Last year, Indians made 2.6 million-plus enrolments in Generative AI courses, again the highest in the world, and that number grew 107 per cent year on year. These are not people doing courses casually. This is a generation actively trying to close a gap they can see between what their college is teaching and what companies are actually hiring for.
The courses pulling the most students are not surprising — Digital Marketing, Data Analytics, AI, Full Stack Development, UI/UX Design, Cybersecurity, Content Writing, Cloud Computing. These are fields where job postings are real, salaries are decent, and the skills can be learned without a four-year commitment. A well-structured six-week course with project work at the end can get a student from knowing nothing about a subject to being able to show an employer something concrete.
That last part matters more than people realise. Hiring managers going through hundreds of resumes from candidates with similar degrees from similar colleges are looking for something that sets one person apart. A certificate from a recognised platform, backed by actual project work, does that. A grade point average, on its own, increasingly does not.
Most students are going online because the cost and flexibility make sense. You can finish a course at midnight if that is when you have time. You can pause it during exam season. You can pay a fraction of what a classroom programme would cost. Platforms like Coursera, Google Career Certificates, LinkedIn Learning and Udemy have made this accessible to students who a decade ago would have had no realistic way to build these skills outside of a formal institution.
Offline bootcamps still have a place — the structure helps students who struggle to push through an online course alone, and the placement support some of them offer is real. But the cost is a barrier. A serious bootcamp can run into fees that simply aren’t affordable for students from lower-income families, even if the course itself is worth it.
And that points to the part of this story that does not get discussed enough. The skill-based learning market is uneven. Some certificates carry genuine weight with employers. Others are essentially worthless — a completion badge from a platform that any recruiter with experience will ignore. Some courses that promise practical learning deliver mostly videos. Students without guidance often cannot tell the difference until they have already paid and finished.
None of this means degrees don’t matter. They still do — for the foundational knowledge, the critical thinking, the credential that still opens certain doors. But the students who seem to be navigating this moment best are the ones treating their degree and their skill-building as two separate but parallel projects, running at the same time, heading toward the same goal.
The degree tells an employer you can learn. The skills tell them you already have.
Sources: Coursera Global Skills Report 2025; India Skills Report 2026 (ETS, AICTE, CII, AIU)
