Meanwhile, India shows evidence of evolving gender dynamics as women adopt online learning at one of the fastest paces globally. The share of overall Coursera course enrolments as well as in STEM courses from women learners in India saw an unprecedented increase. 

Despite high skills proficiency in areas like Machine Learning and Math, India trails in data skills, as per a report by online learning platform Coursera. India ranks 55 in business, at 66 in both technology and data science. In Asia, India is placed at 16, ahead of countries such as the Philippines and Thailand, however below others like Singapore and Japan.

As per Coursera’s Global Skills Report 2021, overall, India ranks 67th globally. Despite the increase in enrolments, India continues to witness a digital skills gap, the report reveals. The study draws on performance data since the pandemic’s onset from more than 77 million learners on the platform to benchmark skills proficiency across business, technology, and data science for over 100 countries.

A report by AWS estimates that digitally skilled workers represent only 12 per cent of India’s workforce, and the number of employees requiring digital skills is expected to increase nine-fold by 2025.

WEF and PwC reveal that national upskilling initiatives could unlock India’s potential to achieve a much faster pace of economic growth and improve the employment rate. However, workforce displacement due to the subsequent waves of the pandemic is compounding the existing gap.

“The pace of skills transformation is slower than the pace of digital transformation in India, as is the case in several countries across the world. Learners must invest in both soft and technical skills to prepare for jobs of the future,” said Raghav Gupta, Managing Director – India and APAC, Coursera.

Cloud Computing is India’s strongest technology skill with 83 per cent proficiency. A report by Wheebox, ranks India among the top 9 nations for global public cloud services, with a growth rate higher than the global average.

As demand for data scientists outstrips supply worldwide, India is also grappling with a shortage of data science professionals. Coursera’s GSR 2021 indicates that Indians have 52 per cent proficiency in ML & 54 per cent in mathematical skills. However, there is significant room for improvement in data analysis and statistical programming, ranked only at 25 per cent and 15 per cent skills proficiency respectively.

Meanwhile, India shows evidence of evolving gender dynamics as women adopt online learning at one of the fastest paces globally. The share of overall Coursera course enrolments as well as in STEM courses from women learners in India saw an unprecedented increase. 

Based on the performance data of millions of learners on Coursera globally, the report also reveals the skills and time required to prepare for entry-level roles.

Recent graduates and mid-career changers can develop entry-level, digital job skills in as little as 35 to 70 hours (or 1-2 months with 10 learning hours per week). On the other hand, someone with no degree or technology experience can be job-ready in 80 to 240 hours (or 2-6 months with 10 learning hours per week).

The most transferable skills across all future jobs are in human skills like problem solving and communication, computer literacy, and career management.  

With 77 million learners, 6,000 institutions, and more than 5,000 courses from the world’s leading universities and industry educators, Coursera has one of the largest data sets for identifying and measuring skill trends. This year’s report is further enriched by the pandemic-driven trends, including 30 million new learners who joined the platform in 2020.

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Before the Marine Corps can fully utilize the power of AI technology and the efficiencies it brings, the service must overcome one major hurdle: trust.

That’s the message from Commandant Gen. David Berger.

“We’re going to have to trust artificial intelligence,” he said during remarks at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Expeditionary Warfare Conference in February. “We’re not trusting today.”

Whether it’s “sensor-to-shooter or fuel to a frontline unit, we put humans in the loop at about 16 places because we don’t trust it yet,” he said.

The best way to boost confidence in the technology is to have Marines train machines, he said. “Then we’ll trust it.”
Brig. Gen. Eric Austin, director of the Marine Corps’ Capabilities Development Directorate, said building that faith in artificial intelligence will unlock its potential.

Service leaders believe the technology will be a key enabler for troops.

“How do we improve the Marine’s ability to understand the environment, make a decision based on what they see and then act, and ensure that those actions are communicated across the force — and do it faster than an adversary?” Berger said. “Some of the technology for doing that already exists.”

Artificial intelligence could assist the service with sifting through large quantities of data to provide commanders with targeted information, he said.

Intelligence information “can be stored, sorted and downloaded from a cloud for our forward deployed forces,” he said.

Austin said intelligence analysis is one of the service’s most mature applications of AI. The Marine Corps is developing tools to process vast amounts of data, provide rapid situational awareness to relieve cognitive burdens and enable Marines to focus on making critical decisions, he said.

The service is also employing artificial intelligence for force protection, he noted. It is currently using the technology for a counter-drone effort to protect forward bases.

The capability is “really neat because it’s a sensor-agnostic approach that provides the inputs through an artificial intelligence framework and leverages algorithms to discriminate threats and offer means to mitigate them, to reduce the burden on operators and … increase the velocity and accuracy of human decisions,” Austin said.

The service is also investing in systems that allow Marines to access data at the tactical edge while operating in denied and degraded environments with limited bandwidth by prioritizing dissemination of the most critical data, he added.

Other key areas of AI development include business processes, support for maintenance missions and improving logistics, he said. It could also be used to inform force development.

The Marine Corps wants to move beyond just the analytics aspect of AI and pursue systems that can truly make recommendations rapidly, he noted.

Austin said the service is on the verge of unprecedented change driven not only by the emergence of new capabilities, but modifications to tactics, techniques and procedures.

“We’ve got to not only realize new capabilities, but we’ve got to know how to use them,” he said. “Part of that comes from just getting these capabilities and these tools in the hands of the Marines and watching them go.”

While the service has AI experts and data scientists on its team, developing the technology is not as simple as just knocking on their door and asking for a system, Austin said.

Artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies such as unmanned systems are ubiquitous across the military’s portfolio of activities and warfighting functional areas, “which adds to the complexity of our approach,” he said.

Key to the way ahead will be to continue to operationalize AI in meaningful and increasingly sophisticated ways, he said. Marines will need to value, understand, field and employ these types of platforms to gain an advantage. The service will need to invest in the science and technology underlying AI systems and test them during experimentation events, Austin said.

The Marine Corps will also need to be open to making mistakes and learning from them as it embarks on an AI-enabled future, he added.

“We’re going to goof it up sometimes. You’re going to fail,” he said.

Ultimately, the technology will be useful across multiple lanes, whether it’s business systems, applications like Joint All-Domain Command and Control — which is being pegged as an internet-of-military-things — or advanced weapon platforms, Austin said.

“We’re just going to learn a lot and find new ways to use it,” he said.

Meanwhile, AI can help with force readiness, Berger said in a recent Washington Post op-ed that he co-authored with Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. with the headline, “To Compete with China and Russia, the U.S. Military Must Redefine ‘Readiness.’”

In the op-ed, the generals argue that readiness “has become synonymous with availability,” and note that this short-term and narrow view is poorly suited for great power competition.

“We propose a new framework for defining readiness, one that better balances today’s needs with those of tomorrow, incorporating elements of current availability, modernization and risk,” they wrote. “As a starting point, we recommend adding to readiness metrics new layers of analysis utilizing artificial intelligence to leverage the military’s data-rich environment. Such a framework would enable military service chiefs to better prioritize investments in research, development and future force design initiatives, rather than spending the majority of their resources on making decades-old capabilities ready for employment.”

This framework would deliver forces that combatant commanders need today but also invest in capabilities needed for the future, they said.

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